The tagline on the promotional materials for Made proclaims that "the guys from Swingers are back!"-and they most certainly are. "Guys" that is. If you thought Jon Favreau (the short, pudgy one) and Vince Vaughn (the one with the bedroom eyes, decidedly more puffy here) were "guys" in the best and worst senses of the word in Swingers, Made has them pushing their "guyness" to extremes. And it's not a pretty sight.

Favreau (making his directorial debut) plays Bobby, a would-be boxer who spends his days working construction in L.A. and his nights driving his stripper-girlfriend Jessica (a gaunt Famke Janssen) from gig to gig. Despite a bad temper that leads him to punch out occasional bachelor-party revellers who get too fresh with Jessica, Bobby is a stand-up guy trying to do right by Jessica and her daughter.

All too often though, Bobby's intentions are undermined by his best friend Ricky (Vaughn), a know-it-all deadbeat who'd rather take a beating than admit he's wrong, which he almost always is. Buddies since high school, Bobby and Ricky are the kind of guys who disagree about almost every subject and settle their differences by beating the hell out of each other-one of the film's better jokes has the two of them looking more and more beat up as the movie progresses.

Underlings in crime boss Max's (Peter Falk, looking almost mummified thanks to all those years of tanning) organization, Bobby and Ricky are looking to move up. Max decides to take a chance on them; he gives them beepers, $1500 and first-class plane tickets to New York. And so it's off to the Big Apple for these L.A. rubes, where Ricky spends money like a sailor on leave and Bobby tries to act like a professional. The machinations that lead to them finally making their "drop" involve rap star Sean Combs as a super-cool New York gangster who knows that strega is an aperitif and not a digestif (as the ever-annoying Ricky insists it is), a Scottish gangster called, for some reason, "the Welshman," a limo driver straight out of The Sopranos (literally-he's played by Sopranos actor Vincent Pastore), and enough booze, clubbing and sordidness to leave even the most party-hearty types a complete mess.

This synopsis might make the film appear funnier than it actually is. It's obvious that Favreau and Vaughn (they produced Made as well), have bought the hype generated by the success of Swingers; they are convinced that they're damn funny, and cool to boot. But the freshness and the strange honesty that made Swingers interesting-it came out when the lounge scene was in full swing, when guys were puffing cigars and getting in touch with their inner sexist-has ossified into strident bantering that is more annoying and silly than humorous. If it wasn't for Chris Doyle's cinematography-he's Wong Kar-wai's regular cameraman and he gives the New York scenes a dreamy, neon-lit feel completely appropriate to the booze-filled revelry on display-Made needn't have been made at all.