Grade: D-

Verdict: Who knew Kevin Smith had a movie this terrible in him?

In a recent television interview, filmmaker Kevin Smith said of his new movie "Jersey Girl," "You'd have to be [expletive] totally mean and jaded not to like this movie."

I disagree. You don't necessarily have to be totally mean and jaded. But in order to like it you do have to be someone who hasn't seen a movie in the past 30 years.

Having made his reputation with such limber independent comedies as "Chasing Amy" and "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back," Smith does an abrupt about-face, delivering a treacly mess that recalls Robin Williams in his "I need a hug" phase. Lacking the glory that was "Ishtar" and the grandeur that was "Gigli," "Jersey Girl" is simply an embarrassingly bad movie.

The second -- and presumably last -- on-screen pairing of the media-made monster known as Bennifer, the picture stars Ben Affleck as Ollie, a slick, high-powered Manhattan music publicist whose wife, Gertrude (Jennifer Lopez), dies in childbirth in the movie's first 10 minutes. Left to raise his baby daughter on his own, Ollie moves home to New Jersey and tries to dump dirty-diaper duty and other parenting chores on his widowed dad, Bart (George Carlin), a government employee with solid family values and a healthy disdain for his son's priorities.

But a PR debacle puts Ollie out of a job and out on the street. Cut to seven years later. Ollie is still out on the street, this time joining his father in the street-cleaning biz.

He's developed a close bond with 7-year-old Gertie (Raquel Castro), but he's starting to hear Manhattan's siren song again. Everything builds to a dramatic choice: Will Ollie go for that all-important job interview with a big Big Apple agency or will he join Gertie, Bart and potential girlfriend Maya (Liv Tyler), as they perform a scene from "Sweeney Todd" at Gertie's grammar school talent show? (Actually, the business with "Sweeney Todd" does approach the operatic awfulness of "Gigli.")

Affleck looks lost. He and his former fiancée still have zero on-screen chemistry, but that's better than Affleck and Tyler or Affleck and Castro, with whom he has less-than-zero chemistry. (Granted, it's hard to imagine how anyone could click with the irritating little Castro, who's like Dakota Fanning's talentless Evil Twin.)

The star is most effective in short-fused urban roles, like the character he played in "Changing Lanes." Here, when he's called upon to express concern, he merely looks constipated. Still, Aflleck isn't this movie's major affliction; that honor goes to the script. Jokes about "Cats" and Madonna seem about two decades too late. And asking Will Smith to appear as himself -- in the part of an unexpected font of wisdom who cheerfully sits in the same agency waiting room as job-hunting Ollie -- is galling and unrealistic.

Smith regulars Matt Damon and Jason Lee have a good time in tiny cameos as mean and jaded publicists. But on the whole "Jersey Girl" is the sort of crass, phony dreck one typically associates with Chris "Mrs. Doubtfire" Columbus or Robert "Forrest Gump" Zemeckis. If they were forced to watch "Jersey Girl," Jay and Silent Bob would hurl chunks.