New York Minute would have been more wisely released the week after Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen, instead of the week after Mean Girls. The latter of these two Lyndsay Lohan vehicles has raised expectations for adolescent girl movies, whereas New York Minute could have more or less held its own against Confessions. As it stands, New York Minute might not perform quite as well at the box-office, which will no doubt bring about the financial ruin of the Olsen Empire. Pity.

Attending films such New York Minute is one of the regrettable side-effects of parenthood, but rather than going in with cynical preconceptions, I took a look at some of the supporting players and decided to at the very least meet NYM half way. Why not? The films creators had assembled a team of role-players that I'm nothing if not a fan of. Eugene Levy and Andrea Martin late of SCTV and plenty of other solid work. Andy Richter, Darrell Hammond . . . I had my mind made up to just watch this film through my young girls eyes and have myself a vicarious moment or two of fun.

As far as the Olsen twins are concerned, I have to confess to almost complete ignorance. Couldn't tell you which one's which, and as a matter of fact, I have to confess to a rather passionate distaste for Full House - the show that I guess you could call the springboard for the Olsen Fortune. The point is, the twins are interchangeable and to give you some idea how little I wound up liking New York Minute (in spite of my best efforts to enjoy it) Bob Saget got the biggest laugh of the film. I hate Bob Saget.

I don't think it's fair to blame the twins themselves for New York Minute being as bad as it is. After all they didn't write this un-funny, cliché-ridden waste of people's lives. In fact the twins really don't do that bad of a job - I mean this is pretty familiar territory for them. The script calls for them two portray two teenage twin girls, who bicker like most siblings and whose interests are vastly different. Ashley (the one who looks so much like the other one) plays a highly motivated type A person whom, on the day in question is preparing to deliver a big speech - a speech (if all goes well) that might very well win her a fellowship that could help get her accepted into Oxford. (Which proves to be a test for her thespian abilities, because in real life she could purchase Oxford.)

Mary-Kate on the other hand possesses no such lofty aspirations. She isn't particularly concerned about school - particularly when it come to details such as attendance and so forth and her plans for the New York Minutes in question involve ditching class and trying to sneak onto the set of a music video of one of her favorite bands A Simple Plan. Her motive here is to attempt to slip a demo-tape of her band into the hands of the band's manager. (He's played by Jack Osbourne - who certainly has a long way to go as an actor). As you might expect a simple premise such as this leads to a good bit of hijinx and misadventure, the tone of which reminded me in alot of ways of the Disney films of the 60's. The Shaggy D.A. - That Darn Cat - Dean Jones era fare where driving like a maniac and a good chase along a skyscraper window-ledge were all part and parcel of a wacky day in the Big Apple.

A recurring theme of the film is that there is a running rift between the sisters (they can't stand each other) that has been festering since the death of their Mother. And their diametrically opposed personalities are a result of this long-standing feud. The madcap mayhem that this day delivers, thrusts the sisters together in an adventure that at the end of the day helps them gain a better understanding of one another and ultimately brings them closer together. And had this been well-written adventure the film might have succeeded in some measure, but sadly it's a haphazardly slapped together mess that demonstrated a few disheartening facts.

One of which is that Eugene Levy is capable of mediocrity. He plays a truant officer who spends the day in pursuit of Mary-Kate. His blinkered Ferris Bueller-like single-mindedness was not well-written and not at all funny. Andy Richter fares even worse as some sort of clandestine operative who speaks with an Oriental accent and spends his time attempting to retrieve a micro-chip that found it's way into Ashley's purse by accident. It gets even wackier when a dog eats the chip and Richter is forced to confiscate Ashley's day-planner (the one that contains her all-important speech) until the dog passes the chip. I leaned over to my wife at this point and made the observation that perhaps the working title of this sequence was probably "Enema of the State" she didn't get the joke and so I retreated even further into my bad mood and didn't even so much as smile when the small dog urinated right in Richter's face. (Yea this is a good movie . . . for me to "poop" on). I decided not to share the "Truimph" joke with my wife, I saw no point in trying to trifle with a perfectly awful experience.

As far as budding romances are concerned the girls repeatedly run into a couple of cute-guys played by Riley Smith and Jared Padalecki. As a matter or fact on one of these occasions the girls are running through the streets of New York wearing nothing but bath-towels (Don't Ask) There are a few other instances where the nubile 17 year olds are similarly exposed for the sake of sadistic teasing. Obviously it's sanitized for our protection, but this will be the last film the twins will shoot as minors.

Director Dennie Gordon (whose resume includes Joe Dirt) keeps the action coming fast and furious as though he were under the misapprehension that if you keep everything going fast - it also makes things funny - but there are record-breaking stretches during this movie that pass without even a mild snicker. I'm not even going to bother you with some of the monumental lapses in logic and plausibility, like I mentioned earlier this film has the creative sensibility of a 60s Disney film, but there were just some really unforgivable stupidity written into this thing. The script is credited to 3 writers yet there's one little scene where a wino of some kind spills some sort of blue alcoholic drink all down the front of Ashley's shirt, and after Mary Kate sizes up the damage she says, "that's not just a cherry Slurpee. I smell alcohol." The weird thing, as I mentioned, was that it was a "big blue stain" - I felt like yelling at the screen, "are you sure Mary-Kate, "blue stains are almost always Cherry?" It seems like someone along the way would have pointed that out?

In any case the film ends in the most predictable manner you could imagine. And it left me to ponder the nature of this man Dennie Gordon. What sort of sinister power does he possess? Somehow he was able to talk Christopher Walken into taking part in Joe Dirt, (which I will say is certainly funnier than New York Minute) but not by much. At this point my mind kept returning to Conan O Brien's former sidekick, the lovable Andy Richter. And again I marveled at the power of this guy Gordon, because you would imagine that Richter read this laughless script and at some point he had to have turned to the page where his character gets his face hosed down with puppy pee? Could this have been the moment where Andy laughed and thought, "yea, this movie's for me - that's good solid comedy. I'm in!"