It's one thing to see a character endure so many hardships you can't help sympathizing and hoping  he or she pulls through. But it's another to slap someone with a Charlie Brown-style raincloud and expect viewers to like him or her right off the bat. This is one of many mistakes made by the misguided comedy Meet Bill. Here's a film without any real sense of purpose, direction, or humor -- one of those stories that possesses no drive and seems to have been made -- well -- just because.

Some people have pretty rough days, but Bill (Aaron Eckhart) is having a rough life. Fast approaching middle age, Bill finds himself sick to death of working at his father-in-law's bank, being married to an inattentive wife (Elizabeth Banks), and serving as an all-around doormat for the rest of the world. The final straw comes when his wife has an affair with a local news anchor (Timothy Olyphant), after which Bill resolves to change his life for the better. With the help of a rebellious high schooler (Logan Lerman) he's supposed to mentor, our beleagured hero starts taking matters into his own hands, ditching his stash of Snickers bars and starting to work more in order to improve himself. But the more Bill works toward regaining his old life, including using a pretty sales clerk (Jessica Alba) to make his wife jealous, the more he comes to realize he might need a more drastic change of scenery than he originally thought.

What hurts Meet Bill most is the fact that almost right off the bat, we couldn't care less about Bill. The guy is the saddest of all sadsacks, belittled by almost everyone he meets and enduring the worst streak of rotten luck known to filmdom. But for all the film's  efforts to mold Bill into a guy care about, he comes across as simply pathetic. It's hard to root for a guy who stands around moping all the time, complaining that his life sucks instead of pulling himself up by his bootstraps and actually doing something about it. I understand it's not so simple for someone going through a midlife crisis to kiss their troubles goodbye, but the makers of Meet Bill make it look so easy (just swim a few laps and lay off the sugar, and boom, back to normalcy), you end up wondering why Bill didn't do anything about it sooner.

Meet Bill wants to be another film like The Weather Man, about a guy whose entire life seems to be going wrong and who tries to grab onto a little bit of happiness. However, it's missing laughs as well as a sense of  dedication to the character that would make the story feel more complete. There's hardly a moment in the entire film where the characters become more than one-note stereotypes.This is a real shame, since Meet Bill has a pretty good cast, one filled with many talented individuals who really should've known better. Eckhart's performance as Bill isn't bad -- in fact, it's one of the movie's few highlights -- but he still appears a bit miscast. Bill should come across as a neurotic bundle of nerves, but Eckhart looks like a matinee idol who's just sticking his gut out. Although Lerman has some amusing moments, Banks is irritating and Olyphant sleepwalks through his paper-thin role. Also, for as little impact she has on the story, Alba's character could've been done away with completely.

Some viewers might get a few chuckles out of Bill's bumpy journey to self-discovery, but I fear this is an encounter many viewers will find themselves regretting. A fun movie could be hiding inside Meet Bill, but its creators apparently didn't look hard enough to discover it. 

MY RATING: * 1/2 (out of ****)

(Released by First Look Pictures and rated "R" for language, some drug use and sex-related material.)