More fizzle than sizzle in this romcom

Gerard Butler and Jessica Biel bring little sparkle to Playing for Keeps.

I don't know exactly when Gerard Butler became a mandatory presence in mediocre romantic comedies, but he seems to have been pigeonholed into a career that relies on his rumbled good looks, roguish charm and willingness to adapt to formula.

In Playing for Keeps, a romcom in which Butler portrays a former pro soccer player, the Scottish-born actor, has plenty of genre cliches to kick around, this time in a story that finds his character trying to win back his the former wife (Jessica Biel) he still loves and the young son (Noah Lomax) he barely knows.

Having squandered his fortune in ill-advised business deals, Butler's George Dryer is well on his way to becoming another has-been athlete. Scottish by birth and temperament, Dryer has moved to Virginia in vague hope of landing a sportscasting job and winning back the family he lost as result of irresponsible behavior; i.e., womanizing.

George begins to earn his chance for redemption when he takes on the job of coaching his son's soccer team, a task that also brings him into contact with a variety of sexually deprived soccer moms who are looking for bedmates and solace.

In this category, we find Judy Greer (needy and insecure) and Catherine Zeta-Jones (sexually aggressive and confident). They both play characters who want to sleep with Dryer, who's trying his best to behave himself.

Additional support is provided by Dennis Quaid, who signs on as a wealthy soccer dad who cheats on his wife (Uma Thurman), a woman who also tries to leap into George's bed.

The sexual situations are ripe for farce, but director Gabriele Muccino tempers the movie's PG-13 impulses with a story that's more interested in fuzzy feel-good sentiment than in becoming a playful sex romp. I guess kids' soccer and adult groping don't make for the greatest mix.

The script, credited to Robbie Fox, can seem disorganized and random. At the movie's midpoint, for example, you may find yourself wondering what happened to Quaid's character and why the script even bothered to include him in the first place. By the end, you'll discover that Quaid's Carl is around only to add a list-minute and totally unnecessary bit of plot business.

Because romance -- even at its most predictable -- needs obstacles, Biel's Stacie is engaged to be married when Dreyer arrives in Virginia. James Tupper portrays Stacie's little-seen fiancé, the most underdeveloped of several underdeveloped characters.

Many flaws can be forgiven in this kind of movie, but it's difficult to overlook the lack of chemistry between Butler and Biel, a deficiency that pretty much sabotages any chance that Playing for Keeps will rise above the mediocrity in which its so thoroughly drenched. A bland Biel fails to charm, raising a question that will make sense only to those who've sat through too many of these drippy romcoms: "Was Katherine Heigl otherwise occupied?"

Action makes hash out of 'Total Recall'

This remake of a 1990 movie is more muddled than mind-bending.

The remake of 1990's >Total Recall is a cluttered, unsatisfying attempt at dystopian sci-fi that ultimately loses itself in a blur of action, much of it presented in a visually confused jumbles.

Like the original, this revamp is based on a Philip K. Dick short story (We Can Remember It For You Wholesale), but the 2012 edition tends to brood more, partly because it replaces Arnold Schwarzenegger with Colin Farrell. Farrell plays Douglas Quaid, a factory worker who's part of the great lumpenproletariat that serves the wealthy in what's left of humanity after a series of devastating wars at the end of the 21st Century.

Farrell's Douglas Quaid lives in The Colony, a futuristic slum that's located in Australia. The Colony is home to legions of drones who staff assembly lines in the affluent United Federation of Britain. Workers from The Colony commute to the United Federation via a kind of super-subway called The Fall, which travels through the Earth at breathtaking speeds.

After missing out on a promotion, Quaid decides to spice up his humdrum life by visiting Rekall, a facility that enables its customers to live out any fantasy they choose -- and to retain a memory of it. With Rekall, illusions become indistinguishable from real experience.

Quaid opts for a spy fantasy, but before his illusory journey gets rolling, he learns that he's not really a worker bee, but a highly trained real spy who's being pursued by the Chancellor of the Federation (Bryan Cranston), one of the least ominous villains in quite some time.

The rest of the story puts a confused Quaid into a situation in which his certainty about everything -- including his identity -- is undermined. His wife (Kate Beckinsale) may not be his wife. If a young woman Quaid meets as he flees his pursuers (Jessica Biel) seems familiar, maybe it's because he's had dreams about her.

Of course, there's also a resistance, led by a character named Mathias, played by Bill Nighy, who demonstrates -- with very little screen time -- that an interesting actor can survive in the middle of a movie full of futuristic bric-a-brac. Aside from Nighy, I wouldn't call any of the performances distinctive.

The best thing about the movie are its CGI enhanced settings, which -- at their best -- are reminiscent of the dystopian sleaze of Blade Runner, another movie inspired by a Dick story. Neither The Colony nor The United Federation look entirely real, but they're interestingly realized, as are various forms of futuristic transportation, notably hover cars.

But when it comes to overall impact, Total Recall's mixture of turgid exposition and frantic chases miss the mark, and if memory serves me, the original movie was better directed by Paul Verhoeven than this one is by Len Wiseman, who previously wrote and directed a couple of Underworld movies.

Look, you know a movie's misfiring when you half wish the actors and story would get out of the way so you could better explore the worlds that the filmmakers have created. Wiseman avoids the kind of mind-bending wooziness that would have made the movie more challenging, subordinating Dick's heady themes to a ton of brain-numbing action that tends to make us indifferent about the movie's outcome.

An FYI: The original was rated R and included a trip to Mars; the remake is earthbound and rated PG-13.