Lisa: “This an Italian restaurant.”

George: “Yes, it is—it is a very good one.”

Lisa: “Oh ‘ya’ looks good.”

The aforementioned quotes pretty much sum up James Brooks’s flat motion picture complete with a banal script, How Do You Know?.  Surprisingly, the films protagonists Lisa, Matty and George played by  Reese Witherspoon, an academy award winning actress,  Owen Wilson and Paul Rudd add anything but talent to the desperate film.

Brooks’s plot line could be summed up in three simple words: boring, nauseating and simply pathetic. Honestly, a ten-year-old could have written a more meaningful script. The film center’s around a soft ball star, Lisa, who is cut from the team and realizes that she has nothing else to look forward to in her life (this incident occurs halfway through the film). In the meantime, while dealing with her “mid-life crisis” Lisa turns to her narcissistic boyfriend, Matty, a baseball star, and becomes rather emotional when she discovers that this high-end superstar enjoys playing the field of women. At the same time, as Lisa and Matty are trying to work through this shocking catastrophe, the film randomly flip flops to George, a man currently being sued, and his relationship with his double-crossing father Charles (Jack Nicholson).  Now, the obvious question would be how do these two fascinating dramas connect? Well, towards the beginning of the film, George, the macho man he is, finds the courage to call Lisa (one of Lisa’s friends had given him her number to set them up) to inform her that he is calling to tell her that he will not be calling her to ask her out because he is currently having an affair that is getting “really, really intense.” Eventually, these three lovers collide into a – big shocker – lover’s triangle.

One would assume that Witherspoon might add a burst of flavor to the insipid film; however, her blasé acting combined with her hopelessly monotone character yielded an awful outcome. During the one scene where Lisa was given an opportunity to display some sort of emotion, Witherspoon’s downpour of tears seemed more bluntly fake than Miley Cyrus’s credited “teenage-rebel-stunts”.

The only emotion this film is yet to extract will be a handful of yawns and emotionally distraught chairs, as their caretakers amble out of the theater before the screen reads “fin.”