D-

It’s hard to believe that there was a time when people actually looked forward to Robin Williams movies, an age long past when his manic shtick promised something edgy and vital. Now as the release of another of his pictures approaches all you can feel is a sense of foreboding—a license to dread, as it were. It’s a feeling that’s amply justified by this dreadful comedy, which proves even worse than his last, “Man of the Year.”

“License to Wed” starts with a supposedly cute Chicago couple—florist Sadie Jones (Mandy Moore) and high school coach Ben Murphy (John Krasinski)—meeting and falling in love. Ben proposes at the thirtieth anniversary party of her parents and she accepts; but she wants to be hitched at the family’s longtime parish church, despite the fact that—as is shortly revealed in only one of a staggering chain of inanities—she hasn’t attended services there (or anywhere else, apparently) for a decade.

Enter Reverend Frank (Williams), St. Augustine’s long-time pastor, a motor-mouth wacko who agrees to perform the ceremony in three weeks, but only if they pass a rush version of his mandatory pre-marital course. It involves avoiding sex until the ceremony, but that’s only the start: the good father insists on a series of nutty exercises, most involving Ben’s humiliation, like caring for a couple of grotesque robot children and demonstrating how well they work together by having each drive through the crowded Chicago streets blindfolded while the other provides directions. Naturally the cleric’s idiotic interference nearly breaks them up before a predictably happy finale that’s supposed to suggest a wise method behind his madness while actually invalidating whatever goofy rationale might have lain behind his “course” in the first place.

This is a really dumb premise, made worse by inept writing, slipshod direction from Ken Kwapis, and performances that substitute painful mugging for comedic finesse. Williams is at his worst, tossing off gruesomely unfunny one-liners while trying to deal with one of the script’s worst conceits: giving Reverend Frank a fanatical young aide (played by gnomelike Josh Flitter, even more irritating here than he was in “Nancy Drew”), who not only breaks into the couple’s apartment to bug it but then spends long hours with Frank in a van on the street outside eavesdropping. (This is intended to be charmingly funny, but it comes across as positively creepy in today’s environment.)

Meanwhile Moore pouts and scrunches up her face so much that you might feel like punching her out (or at least wonder why her fiance doesn’t do so), while the amiable Krasinski, making his big-screen debut, is forced to bumble about shamelessly; he must realize he should never have stepped out of “The Office.” The supporting figures are the usual sitcom bunch—Sadie’s guy friend (Eric Christian Olsen), who makes Ben jealous, and her divorced sister (Christine Taylor) and pompous dad (Peter Strauss); Ben’s wise-cracking married pal (DeRay Davis), who constantly gives him bad advice; the biggest doofus in Frank’s couples group (Brian Baumgartner, from “The Office” too, as also are Mindy Kaling and Angela Kinsey in smaller roles). They’re all saddled with terrible material from Messrs. Barker, Rasmussen and Di Meglio and no help from Kwapis. But no one comes off worse than the estimable Bob Balaban, doing a cameo as a jewelry-store clerk in one of the movie’s most lamentable gags. Technically the movie’s no better than mediocre, down to the revoltingly perky Swingle Singers-like score of Christopher Beck, and it’s nice of Williams, in one of the inevitable outtakes in which everybody is constantly breaking up, to confirm that despite the supposed Chicago setting, it was shot in Los Angeles and looks every bit of it, a few inserted “establishing” shots notwithstanding.

But perhaps the most unbelievable thing about “License to Wed”—a movie that, whatever the intent, believers should really find insulting—is that it presents the Reverend Frank as an extremely popular pastor of three decades’ tenure. It’s unclear what denomination he’s supposed to represent (Episcopalian, perhaps—at first he seems Catholic, though referred to as Reverend rather than Father, but then it’s revealed that he’s recently been married and divorced, and at this point it wouldn’t be comedically sound to show a priest constantly seconded by a young boy—though for some reason St. Augustine’s also comes equipped with a black gospel choir): the writers apparently just chucked whatever they thought they knew about Christian practice into a blender to get this mangled result. But it’s inconceivable that any sort of congregation would put up with a guy this loopy for thirty days, let alone thirty years. Williams’ Reverend Frank is so obnoxious that he’d empty the pews as fast as this dreadful movie will empty theatre auditoriums.

If ever a picture was worthy of cinematic excommunication, this is it. Projectionists should be provided with a license to shred.