Women are pathetic – at least, that’s the message preached by a recent rash of horribly misguided motion pictures. In Sex and the City, they’re materialistic sluts who use their fading feminine wiles to weasel all manner of money-based goodies out of their gullible meat puppets. In Mamma Mia!, they are fading beauties bedevilled by off-key singing and gloopy green-screen romanticism. But both those films are feminist manifestoes compared to the gender equity awfulness of He’s Just Not That Into You. Any film ‘loosely’ based on a baffling self-help tome is asking for trouble, but once gyno-nation gets a whiff of this effort’s ‘ladies are losers’ lament, the fashionable gloves are bound to come off.

The story centres on Gigi (Ginnifer Goodwin), a copywriter for a spices catalogue. Unlucky in love, she seeks advice from her equally ineffectual co-workers Janine (Jennifer Connelly) and Beth (Jennifer Aniston). The former is in a sexless marriage with music industry rep Ben (Bradley Cooper) who is bedding wannabe singer Anna (Scarlett Johansson). The latter can’t get her live-in partner of seven years, Neil (Ben Affleck), to commit to some form of nuptials. While Janine and Beth pursue their own guidance from gal pal ad editor Mary (Drew Barrymore), Gigi develops a platonic bond with wise-guy bar manager Alex (Justin Long). He’s a fount of information on how guys treat girls and, with his help, our heroine hopes to find Mr Right – or at least, avoid Mr Right Now.

This film is over two hours of people talking – endlessly. No action, no musical montages, or tangential moments of physical shtick. Just 130 minutes of voices whining about love, relationships, and the lack thereof, though every conversation, every attempt at interpersonal insight, is buffered by the inherent unbelievability of the emotions described. It’s a film where 30-somethings act like adolescents, where man/woman interaction is illustrated by high-school compatibility test responses. Sure, a little dab of truth occasionally comes spitting out of these well-coiffed and decaffeinated mouths, but we have to wait so long for anything genuine that the fiction becomes all the more obvious.

In this story we barely care for anyone. In fact, the flighty flibbertigibbet main character grates on our nerves like polished nails on a chalkboard: Gigi’s stalker-like sensibility matched with an inhuman level of naiveté causes her every action to resonate like tinfoil on one’s fillings. She even makes the morose, self-absorbed angst of Connelly’s Janine and Aniston’s Beth seem semi-tolerable. Director Ken Kwapis, responsible for such swill as License to Wed, stages everything with a kind of flat finality – we don’t see storylines progress so much as merely turn the page to the next episode of idiocy.

The underlying sentiment ultimately derails the film. Every female character is portrayed as stupid, illogical, borderline psychotic, and desperate for a man to complete her sense of self. Even worse, every problem is resolved in favour of supporting such disconnection from human reality. Unless you’ve spent your entire life in isolation, or literally think that men are from Mars, this movie will blindside your intelligence. Life novices may feel some kinship with these characters. Actual adults will just be insulted. Bill Gibron