This is going to sound really flip, but in casting Heather Locklear opposite Hilary Duff, the producers of “The Perfect Man” found the one person in Hollywood (save Anna Nicole Smith, perhaps) who could potentially make Duff look competent as an actress. It's a forced-perspective thing, like the miniature hobbit sets in “The Lord of the Rings.”

Unfortunately, the illusion doesn't take. Locklear (TV's “Melrose Place”) turns out to be one of the few nonabysmal aspects of “The Perfect Man.” Duff, on the other hand, gives her most plastic performance to date.

The 17-year-old's halfhearted attempts to conjure crocodile tears alone serve as sufficient grounds to declare this the year's worst movie.

Duff (“A Cinderella Story”) pouts, whines and connives as Holly Hamilton, a fed-up teen whose insecure, romantically challenged mother (Locklear) is routinely on the run from failed relationships. Whenever a boyfriend dumps her, Jean Hamilton simply uproots Holly and nearsighted kid sister Zoe (Aria Wallace) and moves to another city.

When the family relocates to Brooklyn, Holly is determined never to move again. To ensure this, she invents a fictitious secret admirer (patterned after a classmate's suave uncle, played by “Sex and the City” stud Chris Noth) and siccs him on Jean. Her rationale: If mom is too engrossed in a fantasy relationship, she won't embark on another real, sure-to-fail relationship (in this case, with a Styx-loving, stuck-in-the-’80s co-worker played by Mike O'Malley). “Queer Eye” queen bee Carson Kressley also drops by to fortify gay stereotypes and pawn off what little remains of his soul.

It's unfortunate that producer Marc Platt (“Legally Blonde”) tapped perennial Duff wrangler Mark Rosman (“Lizzie McGuire”) to direct “The Perfect Man”; with its cruel, semi-incestuous theme of emotional manipulation, it would have made a splendid dark comedy for the likes of Don Roos (“The Opposite of Sex”) or Neil LaBute (“Your Friends and Neighbors”). Instead, Rosman gives us a Mentos commercial.

Jean, in particular, seems out of place in the bright surroundings; the film treats her pathological neediness as little more than an adorable tic, and when everything works out just perfectly for her (for everybody!), we reject it like a mismatched donor organ.

Nor does “The Perfect Man” (based on the supposedly true story of a pair of Tucson women) lend any meaningful insight into the charged dynamic between mothers and their willful teenage girls. My advice: Rent "Freaky Friday" and leave the crying to Duff.