HOW to lose a guy in ten days? Cast into chick-flick purgatory, this guy was lost in ten minutes, faced by another lazy pastiche of screwball romantic comedies, where the leading man and his swell belle are in love with themselves rather than each other. Where's the romance in that?

Kate Hudson (Goldie Hawn in daughter form) is hotshot fashion magazine hack Andie Anderson. Her speciality is a hands-on approach to "How To..." features on fluffy girlie issues, but Andie wants to be a serious political correspondent (even if she looks like she would be crushed by learning the tooth fairy doesn't exist).

Her wicked, cruel editor strikes a deal: write a piece on how to lose a guy in ten days through employing every dating mistake, with herself as the crash-test dummy, and afterwards she can write on any subject.

In a bar with her friends (the magnolia type who offer office coffee and sympathy, then disappear into the wallpaper again), she is spotted by ad agency smart-mouth Benjamin Barry (Matthew McConaughey). She doesn't know - but of course we do - that in order to land the pitch for a diamond account, he has bet his boss he can make a girl fall in love with him in, guess what, ten days.

So begins the game of bluff and counter bluff, as Andie goes about spoiling his night at the basketball finals and boys-only game of poker; and adding pink to his apartment bathroom, teddy bears to every room and a minimalist dog with a weak bladder to his daily chores. She clings, she cries, she leaves message after message on his phone, she subjects him to a Celine Dion concert, but still he won't jettison her, grinning and bearing it in pursuit of that advertising account. Funny? Boring!

Predictable where it boasts of being unpredictable, Donald Petrie's banal, overplayed battle of the sexes wastes Hudson's sexy comic gifts, lets McConaughey be far too smug and has all the faults of vacuous, thin Hollywood movie-making. How not to make a romantic comedy in fact.

Updated: 09:15 Friday, April 18, 2003