Nine Months

Setting aside his personal problems, Hugh Grant's talent for wacky romantic comedy is in full bloom in "Nine Months" as he plays a hapless noncommittal male who has no desire to marry his girlfriend of five years (Julianne Moore), much less become a father. So, when she tells him she is pregnant, he blows a fuse. Not that he blows up, mind you — he just short-circuits.

That's the essential center of "Nine Months," which focuses on Grant's character as he burns up, burns out and allows his relationship to fizzle in the third month of Moore's pregnancy.

He does realize his mistake, of course, and then desperately wants to win her back. But instead, he learns in-line skating and gets an earring.

Unfortunately, "desperate" is the operative word here, as the film sputters and stumbles more than Grant's character.

The story is pretty weak to begin with, so writer-director Chris Columbus, who based "Nine Months" on a French movie that has never been released in this country, fills it out with wacky characters:

— Jeff Goldblum plays an eccentric, neurotic and pompous failed artist — and the unlikely best friend of Grant's character, a high-rolling child psychologist in San Francisco, who seems to be afraid of children.

— Tom Arnold appears in his usual bombastic, obnoxious buddy role, as a car salesman who inadvertently stumbles into Grant's life. In this case, however, Arnold exhibits none of the goofy charm that was evident in "True Lies." (Chalk that up to James Cameron being a stronger director.)

— Joan Cusack is Arnold's wife and mother of their bratty children, doing a variation on her patented sweetly dippy best-friend role, this time adding motherhood to the mix.

— And finally, Robin Williams shows up for two extended comic sequences as a Russian obstetrician whose fracturing of the English language allows him to say crude, vulgar words that are apparently supposed to be funny because they are spoken with a Russian accent. (Is this what happened to Williams' character from "Moscow On the Hudson"?)

Writer-director Chris Columbus, who is a star filmmaker now after the huge success of the two "Home Alone" movies and "Mrs. Doubtfire," has come up with some amusing comic bits, but they generally prove to be funny only while building momentum. By the time a gag reaches its payoff, it seems to have run out of steam. (Check out the "Barney" spoof and the running gag about a praying mantis.)