Intellectually, "The Whole Ten Yards" is not a difficult movie with which to keep pace, but I must admit to being baffled by it all the same. The pratfalls, the face-stabbing jokes, Matthew Perry's mindless echolalia — this stuff is supposed to be funny? Guess I haven't been watching enough C-SPAN lately.

What we have here is a group of appealing, talented actors (Bruce Willis, Amanda Peet, Kevin Pollak, Perry) trying to sustain the jolly rat-a-tat-tat of "The Whole Nine Yards"— a modest hit two years ago — and plowing headfirst into a concrete wall. Instead of zippy and carefree, the sequel feels scatterbrained and mean-spirited. And the kicker is: Who cares? It wasn't like the hopes and dreams of the American movie-going public were riding on this particular franchise, anyway.

Two years after double-crossing the Gogolak mob and faking his own death, reformed hitman Jimmy "The Tulip" Tudeski (Willis) is laying low in Baja, Calif., living with new wife Jill (Peet from "Something's Gotta Give") and becoming quite the homemaker. Actually, he's going a bit mad, babbling on about "cilantro reduction sauces" and — in anticipation of a baby — fashioning mobiles made from the likenesses of squealers who he whacked in his old line of work. As in the original, Jill has her heart set on a career as a contract killer and her tearful incompetence in this regard
supplies the movie with its few genuinely funny moments.

Back in El Norte, Jill's old boss and Jimmy's onetime neighbor, now- prosperous dentist Oz Oseransky (“Friends" mainstay Perry), is stockpiling firearms and secuity gadgets, certain that the Gogolaks will return. Sure enough, they do. Enter Lazlo Gogolak (Pollak from "A Few Good Men"), a 70- something Hungarian goodfella who looks and sounds like a cross between Mr. Magoo and Sid Sheinberg. Freshly paroled from prison, Lazlo strongly suspects that Oz knows the whereabouts of Jimmy, so he kidnaps Oz's wife, Cynthia (Natasha Henstridge) — who used to be Jimmy's wife, if you remember — to jog his memory.

Naturally, Oz seeks help from Jimmy, who we know isn't really insane, but is merely pretending to be that way to facilitate some scheme he cooked up with Cynthia. It doesn't make a lick of sense, but Oz's erratic emotional state does allow Perry and Willis to revive their tough mook/wormy wimp routine from the first movie. For all the convoluted plotting — which benumbs more than deceives us — director Howard Deutch (“Grumpier Old Men") and screenwriter George Gallo (“Bad Boys II") resort to the hoariest, most obvious plot devices to tie it all up: Guns loaded with blanks, secret identities, ad nauseum. Nor do the filmmakers prove capable of balancing the movie's uneasy mix of slapstick and violence.

At times, Jimmy comes off as unamusingly sadistic, threatening to mutilate his wife in one scene, pummeling a father in front of his horrified child the next. Sure, these scenes will garner a few laughs, but it will be a nervous laughter, the kind you hear when something isn't funny at all.

The Whole Ten Yards
Starring: Bruce Willis, Matthew Perry, Amanda Peet, Kevin Pollak
Rating:PG-13 (sexual content, some violence and language)
Running time: 96 min.
Grade: D