Who knew that when writing a recap of the year in cinema 2006 (that standard end-of-year space stuffer beloved of journalists trying to get out of town for the holidays) that I would witness the absolute worst film of that year just after my deadline? Yet You, Me and Dupree managed rather late in the day to hit a new high in low.

If the Rat Pack gave us Some Came Running and Ocean's 11 and the Brat Pack managed to create Rumble Fish, the Frat Pack (Owen Wilson, Jack Black, Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn), having started promisingly with, among other projects, the great Royal Tenenbaums and entertaining Zoolander, has lately been sinking into a self-regarding parody of its boyish self. A list of recent "Frat Pack" offerings reads like a truants' roster: Starsky and Hutch, Wedding Crashers, The Break-Up, Meet the Fockers, etc. Crushingly juvenile films that are as dull as they are depressing.

Where to begin? Molly (the negligible Kate Hudson) and Carl (alas, Matt Dillon) are in Hawaii for their wedding. All is well until friend Neil (Seth Rogen) alerts the pair that Dupree is on his way. Wedding-crashing best man Dupree (Owen Wilson) starts disrupting plans almost immediately upon arriving. Yet somehow the wedding goes off without too many hitches and Molly and Carl return to their little California bungalow to embark on wedded bliss.

Very soon, however, slacker Dupree shows up at the door with no job, no home and no prospects. Molly and Carl take him in where he proceeds to become the proverbial guest from Hell. The house becomes a wreck, Dupree's porn lies about, he manages to fill two toilets to capacity with the fruit of his buffalo-wing binges and then finally manages to burn the living room down in a fit of candle-lit lovemaking with a loose librarian. Bear in mind that it took two men to direct this epic.

For those who were born with an IQ over 80, this will make for grim viewing. You, Me and Dupree is so aggressively unfunny that you actually begin to feel more pity than fury for its creators. Obviously, Hudson needs the work and Wilson has proved himself to be a man whose taste is in his mouth, so their presence here is sadly explainable. But what could have convinced Matt Dillon and Michael Douglas to sign on for this nonsense? Dillon particularly, after his superb performance earlier this year as Charles Bukowski's alter-ego in Factotum, has never made such a poor choice in a film. If he was hoping to finally appeal to those legions of 18-year-old adenoidal cretins, who sit hunched in multiplexes barking at cheap laughs, while Diet Coke and faux popcorn butter drip down their slackened jaws, he may have succeeded, but at what price?

Douglas' role somehow manages to be even more thankless. As Molly's rich, powerful father, he takes a dislike to the more modestly successful Carl. To try and defeat Carl, Douglas' Mr. Thompson decides to try and convince his new son-in-law to get a vasectomy. Laughs galore. Rogen's Neil is the requisite over-sexed fat friend that no frat comedy would be complete without.