MAIL ORDER WIFE — ** — Eugenia Yuan, Andrew Gurland, Adrian Martinez; with subtitles; rated R (vulgarity, profanity, sex, violence, racial epithets).

"Mail Order Wife" gives the audience plenty of reasons not to like it, but when it throws in a cameo by steroids-scandal opportunist Jose Canseco — persona non grata everywhere he goes now, not just in Major League Baseball parks — it's pretty much the last straw.

This sporadically amusing comedy is clearly trying to follow in the footsteps of Christopher Guest, whose successful "mockumentaries" "Waiting for Guffman" and "A Mighty Wind" have made the format fashionable.

There are some good ideas at work here, but "Mail Order Wife" can't decide whether it's making fun of documentary filmmaking, "green-card" based marriages or desperately lonely men.

The film's title refers to Lichi (Eugenia Yuan), a Burmese woman who's hoping to get her U.S. citizenship through a marriage "arrangement." So she's agreed to marry Adrian (Adrian Martinez), a New York hotel doorman who hasn't had a lot of luck with women.

Unfortunately, the two aren't very compatible; for one thing, she's horrified by his idea of "cuisine." And when Adrian starts steering their conversations to the subject of children, Lichi balks.

Further complicating matters is the constant presence of Andy (Andrew Gurland, one of this film's two directors), a documentary filmmaker who's been interviewing the two. He falls for Lichi and also proposes to her.

On the plus side, the film doesn't turn into the straight-forward romantic comedy it could have become and instead goes off in a completely different direction. Which is smart because none of the three characters is very likable or sympathetic. In particular, Martinez's portly suitor comes off as grotesquely cartoonish, and, as played by Yuan, Lichi isn't appealing marriage material.

Worse, the film's jokes just aren't that funny (including the Canseco cameo). And jabs at the rather pathetic males in the film are too mean-spirited.

"Mail Order Wife" is rated R for crude humor about and references to sexual functions, occasional use of strong sexual profanity, some sexual content, violence (mostly slapstick) and use of racial epithets. Running time: 91 minutes.

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E-mail: jeff@desnews.com