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It sounds like a vehicle with plenty of comedy mileage, but Failure To Launch quickly runs out of steam. Matthew McConaughey does his twinkly-eyed bit as a bed-hopping bachelor who refuses to leave the parental home while a sneaky Sarah Jessica Parker offers herself as bait - a timely premise in a world where many thirtysomethings haven't flown the nest. Sadly, director Tim Dey's attempts to poke fun at "adultescents" amounts to having McConaughey fall down a lot.

With a name like Tripp it's perhaps inevitable that our hero should spend a lot of time flat on his face, but screenwriters Tom J Astle and Matt Ember have no excuse. It begins promisingly enough with Tripp revelling in the cushiness of being waited on by mom (an underused Kathy Bates). But contrivance creeps in when she and dad (Terry Bradshaw) recruit Paula (Parker) to lure him away.

"A SERIES OF ILL-CONCOCTED SCRAPES"

Besides the fact that hiring a woman to play with your son's affections is cruel, the strategy is made more implausible by a series of ill-concocted scrapes. One of few legitimately funny moments sees Paula seduce Tripp within earshot of his parents. But generally Astle and Ember fail to find the laughs inherent to his situation. On top of pratfalls, they have him attacked by critters to bolster some silly notion about man's defiance of nature, then a revelation about his past comes out of leftfield in a lame attempt to tug the heartstrings. With a deadweight script and low wattage generated by McConaughey and Parker, this was never going to take off.