C-

For a self-styled romantic comedy, “Home Sweet Alabama” offers very little genuine romance and even fewer laughs. What it does contain is a ton of stereotypes, some desperate attempts to insert shards of sugary niceness into an avalanche of hick humor and obnoxious contrivances, and a surprisingly shrill lead performance from Reese Witherspoon. It’s a sad sitcom of a movie, largely devoid of charm.

Witherspoon, only slightly less mannered than she was in “Legally Blonde” (and much less amusing than in “Election”), plays hip fashion designer Melanie Carmichael, who gets engaged to supremely eligible bachelor Andrew (Patrick Dempsey), the smooth-talking son of New York’s mayor, in a proposal sequence that tries to do “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” one better but doesn’t begin to match that picture’s glamour. Before the nuptials can occur, however, she has to skedaddle down to her old hometown in Alabama, where her husband still lives. Jake (Josh Lucas) is a childhood friend whom she wed young and then left–and who’s refused to sign divorce papers to set the blonde legally free. Once restored to her hayseed parents (Mary Kay Place and Fred Ward) and down-home friends, however, Melannie grows uncertain about whether she’s making the right decision–especially after she has a few of those formulaic verbal battles with Jake of the kind that make baldly apparent to everyone but the participants that they’re obviously meant to be together. Andrew comes south with his stuffy mother the mayor (Candice Bergen) for a wedding, but anyone who’d bet on it happening must never have seen a movie before.

Romantic triangles involving near-bigamy were commonplace in the days of real screwball comedy in the thirties and forties, and they often worked brilliantly; but this is but the palest reflection of them. The backstory between Melanie and Jake is sketched in the most perfunctory way, and their hostility at the beginning of the story seems utterly rote. In Dempsey’s hands Andrew is a thoroughly bland presence; the third wheels in Preston Sturges’ movies were never the brightest of fellows either, of course, but they were at least given funny bits of business–as Dempsey is not. The old-time filmmakers also understood the value of peopling their farces with colorful and amusing side characters. Here they’re either curiously subdued redneck types (Ward, who looks amiably embarrassed throughout), smarmy East Coast pseudo-sophisticates (Bergen, who curls up her nose at everything and everybody and spouts a series of snide, unfunny quips) or crude caricatures (Ted Manson as a wacky confederate “Colonel” who plays with ordnance). And as a sop to current PC demands, the script includes two lovable gays: a flamboyant black fellow designer who befriended Melanie in the Big Apple (Nathan Lee Graham) and down-home buddy Bobby Ray (Ethan Embry) who–horror of horrors–is played for sympathy.

Technically “Home Sweet Alabama” is okay, and it must be admitted that Lucas, who’s mostly played unpleasant types in his previous films, here exhibits an easygoing charm that’s quite ingratiating. And despite the fact that he’s given very little to do (a corny gag involving an overzealous recliner, his biggest bit, should definitely have been excised), it’s also nice to encounter Ward again. But any delights in the picture, as anxious to please as it is, are few and far between. Lightning strikes twice to bookend the story in “Home Sweet Alabama,” but comedically there’s very little electricity in between.