When a movie sits on the shelf for about a year after completion, as has been the case with Peter Askin and Douglas McGrath's "comedy" Company Man (released in Europe last May), it is a very bad sign indeed. Given the dreck that reaches our screens every week, a movie has to be pretty awful for its distributor to bury it for so long rather than have it see the inside of a multiplex. Company Man-a satire that places a nerdy loser at the centre of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961-is such a picture.

Hectored by his über social climber of a wife Daisy (Sigourney Weaver), who wants more and wants it now, anal high-school teacher Allan Quimp offers up a little white lie: his low-paying job as an English teacher is just a front for his glamorous undercover position with the CIA. Of course Daisy blabs it all over town and when a visiting Russian ballet dancer (Ryan Phillipe) uses Allan to defect (telling him, "I want to defecate"-funny, eh?), CIA honchos decide that they better recruit him to avoid a scandal. No problem, they think, we'll just send him off to a quiet backwater like, say, Cuba. Quimp, whose passion for grammar alienates all who meet him, is soon embroiled in the Cuban Revolution and the Bay of Pigs invasion (events that, despite happening two years apart, the film sees fit to squeeze into a long weekend or so).

In addition to headliners McGrath, Sigourney Weaver and John Turturro (playing a gung ho anti-Castro nut), the film features Anthony LaPaglia, Denis Leary, Alan Cumming, Welcome to the Dollhouse's Heather Matarazzo and an uncredited Woody Allen-a great cast, right? Except that all of them seem to realize they are in a complete dog of a film and give performances that reflect this (save for Woody, who is positively cute in his beret and linen suit as the US spy chief in Havana who prefers acid and red wine over reality). The forced nature of the ensemble's acting brings to mind one of those very bad "Saturday Night Live!" sketches, the kind where the actors know the sketch is dead in the water and the audiences knows the same but the show must go on, to the embarrassment of all involved.

Co-director McGrath must take most of the blame for this mess (not least for his extremely annoying portrayal of the wimp Quimp). Having made such an impressive debut with Emma, the Gwyneth Paltrow film that he wrote and directed, he seems to have lost all sense of comic timing. I'm sure he was thinking of the Graham Greene novel Our Man in Havana (made into a delicious satire of the spy game by Carol Reed, starring Alec Guinness) when he started on the project. Unfortunately, the result makes even the silliest aspects of a film like Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me look like high art.

And what is Woody Allen doing here? Well, McGrath is obviously a pal-he's appeared in Allen's Sweet and Lowdown, Celebrity and Small Time Crooks and he co-wrote Allen's Bullets Over Broadway. If friendship does indeed mean going that extra mile for a buddy, Company Man takes this notion to a ridiculous extreme.