From the moment Paul McCartney's stunningly bad cover of Buddy Holly's "Maybe Baby" starts playing over the opening credits, Ben Elton's unfunny romantic comedy about a successful middle-class English couple's (Hugh Laurie and Joely Richardson) attempts to get pregnant is dead in the water. Like McCartney's opening tune, the film, is insipid, flat, devoid of timing and-except for Rowan Atkinson's cameo as a vile, nausea-inducing gynecologist-almost completely misconceived (pun intended).

Written by Elton, whose work as a co-writer on the hilarious "Blackadder" series would suggest he CAN be funny, the film gives us Sam Bell (Laurie), a senior producer at the BBC who is simultaneously suffering from a creative block and worried about the fact that he and wife Lucy (Richardson) can't seem to get pregnant. "Sperm is like flatulence-it's different when it's your own," he mutters oh so hilariously when faced with the possibility that his tadpoles aren't swimming in the right direction. Lucy, who works for an actors' agent (Ab-Fab's Joanna Lumley) records her thoughts in a diary as the two of them go through test after test, before settling on in-vitro fertilization as their last hope.

Sam hits on the incredibly obvious idea of writing a script based on their travails. Lucy objects but Sam goes ahead surreptitiously and his bosses at the Beeb really like it-so much so that they've hired young Scottish hot-shot Ewan Proclaimer (Tom Hollander) to direct. Sam presses on and when he's asked to flesh out the female character, he delves into Lucy's diary and plagiarizes whole passages. Can you see the "heartbreaking" confrontation coming from a mile away?

Leaving aside the idea that an in-vitro fertilization comedy is only a modestly appealing prospect at best (the movie is so single-minded that it's sort of like those guests at the dinner party who choose to talk about nothing other than the exploits of their children), Maybe Baby is the kind of movie that thinks stepping in a pile of dog shit is funny and the line "You are my everything" is serious. It's a movie where the rightfully jilted, smug and selfish Sam (played as a kind of stud-muffin, if you can believe that, by the bug-eyed Laurie) does what any self-respecting, badly written movie character does: he sprouts a scruffy beard, grows his hair long and drinks too much, three cliched movie signs that say he's repented, found wisdom and become worthy of his woman's love.

What fun there is to be had in Maybe Baby lies on the film's periphery. Atkinson's show-stealing turn as the creepy gynecologist-"Super guts!" he exclaims after examining Lucy's insides-and Hollander's demented, heroin-obsessed director (a snide putdown of the Trainspotting/Irvine Welsh/down-and-out Scottish hipster thing) are so over-the-top that you can't help but smile. It's just too bad that in a comedy with so many likeable actors, that is ALL there is to smile about.