Avis Metacritic

If I Were You is a screwball comedy for Canadians—not LOL funny, but as crazy as you might expect Toronto to get.

A wannabe French-style infidelity farce that keeps indulging in unnecessary bathos and subplots.

If I Were You has more than its share of laughs, but director Joan Carr-Wiggin needed to cut half an hour to make this fly without interest flagging. She had the exact same problem with her last movie, “A Previous Engagement.’’

It’s a complex geometry that’s mined for some interesting perspectives on romantic fulfillment, but the film’s comic sense (exemplified by a drunken Harden acting inappropriately) is slack and its dramatic conclusion unfulfilling.

A modern cinematic equivalent of the sort of tired sex farces that used to populate Broadway with regularity, If I Were You simultaneously exploits and squanders the talents of its star, Marcia Gay Harden.

Mostly it just redefines the word “asinine.” Marcia Gay Harden never makes a wrong move, but this movie is so futile, one goes away convinced that the moves she makes are hardly worth making.

Hardworking Oscar winner Harden and beguiling Spanish star Watling do nothing for this haphazard film, which belatedly decides it wants to be a stage satire as the women lark into a ridiculous avant-garde production of “MacBeth.” Bloody awful.

A comedy that is so scatterbrained and long-winded that much of it feels invented on the spot. (It’s also a half-hour too long.)

This is Nancy Meyers territory, but leaden with passé observations about lovelorn women...and hardly ebullient as either oddball-pair comedy or housewife-revenge fantasy.