DORIS Day and Rock Hudson would not be impressed. It's hard to believe that Maid in Manhattan and true classics of the genre like Pillow Talk and Move Over Darling - both, of course, featuring Day at her charming, apple pie-flavoured best - could fall under the same heading of "romantic comedy".

That, apparently, is the case, though fans of either romance or comedy are unlikely to come away from this under-powered cinematic experience feeling particularly satisfied.

It's not the slightness of the storyline that rankles, or the puddle-deep characterisation. After all, you don't go to a romantic comedy looking for an Anna Karenina-style epic or revelatory philosophical insights into the human condition. What you do expect, though, is a decent slice of escapist fun with, hopefully, a pair of funny, charismatic leads. In this respect, Maid in Manhattan fails more spectacularly than the average White House administration.

J-Lo and Fiennes are likeable enough. Fiennes, astonishingly, even manages to spend quite a lot of the film grinning (rather leading me to suspect that this isn't actually Fiennes, but a bit of genetically modified spare flesh from J-Lo's bottom). But they're not nearly interesting enough, or interested enough in each other, to make a cinema audience really care what happens to them.

The worst thing about this film, though, is its fake moral sermonising. The message couldn't have been hammered home less subtly if it was an enormous wooden stake with Christopher Lee's name on it in neon lights. At one point, Bob Hoskins - criminally under-used as a cliched Jeeves-style butler - turns to J-Lo and croaks something like: "It's not the job you do that defines you, it's how you rise after you're knocked down".

Self-help manual addicts might find that sort of thing uplifting. I just find it disturbing that a self-proclaimed romantic comedy can fall so wide of the mark where its defining qualities are concerned and have the cheek to try and sound profound.

Rating: 4/10