If Gigli is to be believed, Ben Affleck has not only the power to attract and convert lesbians into heterosexuality, but the ability to cure Tourette's syndrome while simultaneously managing one of the worst Tony Soprano impressions ever.

Here is a film that exists on another plane. It is so insane, so misguided, so Dadaesque, so Kafkaesque, you'll think I'm exaggerating. I'm not. It opens with Affleck as a mob thug with a pompadour, staring into the camera, saying “You just never know,” and he's right: You just never do. Some movies look bad and are great and some movies look great and are bad, and some movies look bad and are bad. This is Gigli.

When the camera reverses, we see Affleck is actually talking to a man who's been bound and gagged and shoved into a dryer. Two hours and one Al “HOO-HA!” Pacino scene later, I understood how the man felt. About midway through the film, directed by Martin Brest, who made the brisk Midnight Run as well as the momentum-challenged Meet Joe Black, Jennifer Lopez instructs us in the art of sucking an eyeball out of its skull. She explains to a young punk that methods exist of removing eyes with such sudden force the nerves leading to the brain get yanked along and “an opponent is left with no memory of having seen anything.”

If this is true, J.Lo, please, by all means, pluck out mine offending eye.

Then, J.Lo quotes from Sun Tzu and says, “Gobble, gobble” and we listen to Affleck say he is “the pimp mack daddy of cool, the original gangstah's gangstah, sit at my feet and learn” and then Christopher Walken shows up like an avant-garde Mr. Roper on Three's Company and chews on a paper cup and then Ben and J.Lo kidnap a teenager with developmental disabilities and they drive around Los Angeles and Ben cuts the thumb off a corpse with a butter knife and the kid sings “Baby Got Back” and then says he wants to “go to Baywatch” and it all ends with Ben and J.Lo staring off into the Pacific Ocean and the kid with developmental disabilities reciting the weather report for Wales to a woman in a pink bikini.

Everyone dances on the beach.

The end.

I kid you not. And it's not French. Or intentionally bizarre. Or intended to be a commentary on the limitations of celebrity. It's either a romantic comedy or a hard-edged drama about a gangster discovering himself - I think Brest went for a dramedy laced with poignancy starring real-life lovers J.Lo and Ben, America's bling-blingiest glamour couple. Their romance and impending nuptials and Diane Sawyer gush-a-thons - it all began when they met on the set of Gigli. Making this Gigli: Episode 1 - The Phantom Menace. Episode II, Jersey Girl, a film they made with Kevin Smith, opens next spring. Then we'll have this conversation again. And the Earth can spin into the sun.

Just for the record, the title of this one, Gigli, is pronounced JEE-Lee - “rhymes with `really,'” Gigli himself (Affleck) says. Not GIG-Lee. Not GUY-Gli. Not J.LO Lee. Not even I-Demand-A-Refund Lee. Nothing is more depressing than having to report that the gossiping nerds on the Internet were right: Gigli is a jaw-dropping disaster that goes nowhere but on and on, random scene after random scene about two mob assassins. It is a slow-motion meltdown that starts oddly and 20 minutes later combusts spectacularly, the kind of fiasco some enterprising fan of fabled debacles will book as a midnight movie and college students will arrive in pompadours and leather and shout “Gobble, gobble” back at the screen.

Larry Gigli is an idiot and his mob boss, Louis (Lenny Venito), knows it. I'm going to kick you in the side of your big fat head, Venito tells Affleck with such surprising conviction possibly this scene came from behind-the-scenes footage intended for the DVD. He asks Gigli to kidnap Brian (Justin Bartha), the aforementioned teenager whose undefined disability includes Tourette's syndrome, although Brest plays it more like a curable dose of cute Rain Man-itis. Before you can ask yourself if the film's stereotypes could get more offensive, Gigli runs into Ricki (Lopez), a steely (we're told) contract killer for the mob who wears halter tops and low slung jeans and does erotic yoga. She is hired to make sure Gigli finishes his job.

Which creates a profound rupture in the very premise: Why hire Gigli in the first place?

Later, Pacino gets one scene as a kingpin who shoots a man through the head and says, “I think we can say without a shadow of a doubt that some mistake has been made.”

Serpico, you have no idea. Once Brian is kidnapped, the film becomes a series of conversations about men and women and whether Ricki will sleep with Gigli. The roadblock is Ricki is a lesbian.

They didn't tell you that in the trailer, huh? Anyway, Gigli is undaunted. (My guess is he saw Affleck as a lesbian-smitten charmer in Chasing Amy.) They talk some more. Bada bing. Ricki is miraculously swayed and falls for Gigli despite being a lesbian, which might even have been remotely believable if Brest, who also wrote the screenplay, had: A. more convincing actors, or B. a focus, or C. better-explained rival hit men. Instead we get this: “The whole man thing doesn't do much for me,” Ricki says, and your brain quietly raises its alert status to orange.

“But you got through to me.”

HOO-HA! indeed. Ricki, a coiled jungle beast of a killer, crumbles. The uncomfortable truth is when romances spill off the screen, there's a split in the movie universe and every seductive look, every on-screen argument, carries new heightened meaning. Making one of the characters a lesbian gives the filmmakers a loophole when audiences complain that the two leads have no chemistry. So you become a kind of frustrated paparazzo instead, angling for a snapshot of the exact instant they secretly fell in love.

That's the only fun to be found. My guess is Ben and J.Lo became Bennifer sometime before the conversation about whether a thumb is actually a digit but after the conversation about how women are bulls and men are cows.

Really.

First Published August 1, 2003, 6:20 p.m.