It’s pretty sad when you feel the need to title your comedy to remind people of an Adam Sandler movie, even one of his better ones. But that’s what the makers of “The Wedding Singer” (sorry, “Ringer”) have done.

The picture is a starring vehicle for Kevin Hart, who hit the box office bulls-eye with “Ride Along” and is now a hot commodity. This time around he’s paired not with Ice Cube but Josh Gad, who plays Doug Harris, a friendless nebbish desperately in need of a best man and seven groomsmen for his upcoming wedding to one Gretchen Palmer (Kaley Cuoco-Sweeting). At the suggestion of their ultra-swishy planner Edmundo (Ignacio Serricchio), he visits the office of Jimmy Callahan (Kevin Hart), who makes a living pretending to be the best friend/man for fellows who can’t secure one for themselves. Though Doug’s plea reeks of desperation—it will require Jimmy to pretend to be a military chaplain named Bic Mitchum while recruiting and preparing seven other guys in addition to himself to make up the wedding party—the consummate fixer agrees to take on the huge assignment, which those in his line of work call a “golden tux” because it’s never been successfully pulled off.

Of course, much madness ensues—a meet-and-greet luncheon with the bride’s family, training sessions for the phony groomsmen, a wild bachelor party, a mud-slogged football game arranged by the bride’s father (with Joe Namath as his quarterback), a rehearsal dinner and, of course, the ceremony itself, burdened with lots of last-minute snafus.

During all this, several patterns become apparent:

(1) The script is basically misogynist. Yes, this is a guy movie, and so one expects the misfits that Jimmy collects to play the groomsmen to be a bunch of oddballs—the most notable of whom is Jorge Garcia from “Lost” (which serves as the basis for the final joke). But all of them, however weird they are and however gross their actions, are ultimately portrayed affectionately. On the other hand, except for a couple of them, all the female characters are either selfish (like the bride) or air-headed. To be sure, there’s a stripper called Nadia (Nicky Whelan) who has the proverbial heart of gold. And the bride’s sister, who’s also her maid of honor (Olivia Thirlby), is a clever gal who sees through Jimmy’s charade. But that just makes her like him all the more.

(2) It’s also homophobic. The first joke, delivered by the bride’s macho father (Ken Howard), uses “gay” as an insult (others instances will follow), and Edmundo is treated as a walking visual gag. (There’s a switch halfway through that revisits the character, but in trying to subvert the stereotype it just creates another.) It’s a curious fact about the proliferation of bromances like this one that the genre requires squeamish males in the audience to be reassured that there’s nothing sexual at work—even when the pals engage in a prolonged dance sequence as they do here (one of the two obligatory music montages, the other being the bachelor party).

(3) It has a curious tendency to engage in what amounts to elder abuse for laughs. That football game, which ends with the oldsters getting pummeled and kicked, is one example. But what to make of that get-together lunch, which ends with the bride’s grandmother (Cloris Leachman) literally going up in flames? And as if that weren’t bad enough, a tasteless joke about her follows, as well as a later shot of her near-mummified face. Let’s just say it’s not a pretty sight.

(4) It goes without saying that the movie is endlessly rowdy and raunchy, in both the language and the slapstick. It likes violence, not only in the football scene (people—even children—being pelted with baseballs, for instance); Gad is the special target, going through a brutal comic abduction (at least since Doug’s face is covered with a mask, you know it’s a stuntman taking the fall) but, even worse, suffering a prolonged scene in which his privates are attacked by a dog. We should be thankful, one supposes, that the details of that assault are kept off-screen—as we can for the fact that we don’t get visual proof of one groomsman’s repeated assurances that he has three testicles.

But despite—or because of—such matters, this reviewer must report that the preview audience seemed to enjoy “The Wedding Ringer” enormously, and even those likely to find some parts of it offensive will probably chuckle elsewhere. The plot may be idiotic, but at least it’s preferable to the last script by Jeremy Garelick (who also directs here, adequately) and Jay Lavender, the Vince Vaughn-Jennifer Aniston bomb “The Break-Up.” And the picture does have some other virtues. While Hart, for example, gets the opportunity to do some of the frenetic shtick his fans love, he’s also given some quieter moments, and it’s nice to see he can work at a lower volume. (Naturally, Jimmy mellows as the story proceeds, and by the close he’s a softie, ready for real friendship and romance himself.) And Gad, though forced to play a character who’s basically a dolt, shows real comic chops; he’s not just a chubby fellow filmmakers should go to when Jonah Hill is unavailable. They work well together, too, even in that dance sequence. Each of the groomsmen—Garcia, Affion Crockett, Dan Gill, Corey Holcomb, Colin Kane, Alan Ritchson and Aaron Takahashi—has his moments, however broad, and Serricchio does the swishy bit with the necessary flamboyance. Howard, meanwhile, makes a thoroughly detestable jerk.

The movie is also a more polished piece of work than many of today’s second-tier comedies. Bradford Lipson’s widescreen cinematography is crisp, and Chris Cornwell’s production design keeps things colorful. As edited by the trio of Jeff Groth, Shelly Westerman and Byron Wong, things do get bumpily episodic, but that’s more the fault of the script’s tendency to deteriorate in the latter stages than their technical failings.

The verdict? This “Wedding” is by no means a classy affair, but in the post-“Hanover” era it’s not the worst comedy to come along. That may be faint praise, but it’s all Hart and company deserve.

Growing concern about cybercrime might seem to give Michael Mann’s new film a leg up, but despite the director’s almost legendary reputation for style, “Blackhat” (the term for someone who violates internet security for illegal purposes) is nothing but a shallow exercise in Hollywood action tropes, designed to pander to the growing Asian market and visually ugly to boot. The last ten years haven’t been kind to the once-hot director, and this soporific misfire represents a new nadir for him, as depressing in its way as “The Counselor” was for Ridley Scott and a late-in-life potboiler like “Topaz” was for Alfred Hitchcock.

The picture’s problems begin early on, with a big set-up scene that simply fizzles. After a space-perspective view of earth, the camera zooms in to a nuclear plant in China, and then to the inner workings of its reactor, using animation to suggest how malware worms its way into operations to cause a devastating explosion. The sequence is supposed to cause tension and a jolt, but it fails miserably, not only because the animated portion is frankly as dull as later scenes of folks punching keyboards in front of computer screens will be, but because the catastrophe is dramatized in cramped, claustrophobic shots that suggest a tight budget rather than any directorial vision.

Assigned by Beijing bigwigs to track down the source of the disastrous hack is Captain Chen Dawai (Leehom Wang), a young cybersecurity expert, who immediately enlists his sister Wei Tang (Lien Chen) to assist in the investigation. He quickly learns that a similar attack on a U.S. reactor was aborted, which means that if he can secure American cooperation in identifying the source, the two countries working together might be able to track down the responsible party. Soon he and Wei Tang are in Washington, collaborating with DOD honcho Carol Barrett (Viola Davis). That leads to the revelation that the attack was mounted on a program conceived by Chen Dewai himself, in collaboration with his old MIT roommate Nick Hathaway (Chris Hemsworth), currently ensconced in a federal prison. They spring Hathaway from the pen to become an additional member of their team—accompanied by an overseer for him, federal marshal Mark Jessup (Holt McCallany).

The resultant quintet are soon globe-trotting in pursuit of the elusive villain, first to Los Angeles, where they track down an underling who hacked a cyber-security firm; then to Hong Kong, where they encounter the mastermind’s vicious henchman Kasar (Ritchie Coster); then to Jakarta, where they (or those of the team who have survived thus far) locate his server; and finally to Malaysia, where they pinpoint the object of his dastardly plan. It’s a windingly labyrinthine plot, but one that grows sillier by the twist, ending in a revelation about the bad guy’s ultimate intention that’s absolutely tinny—an adjective that’s been chosen advisedly, as anyone who sits through the movie will understand.

Along the way, of course, Mann tosses in one action set-piece after another: a fight scene in a Los Angeles restaurant, a chase-and-shootout in the narrow streets (and tunnels) of Hong Kong, another explosive firefight in the city; and a final face-off set against the backdrop of a colorful parade in a Jakarta square. But for the most part they have remarkably little impact because they’re so ineptly choreographed and muddily shot and edited (by Stuart Dryburgh and the team of Joe Walker, Stephen Rivkin, Jeremiah O’Driscoll and Mako Kamitsuna, respectively). Only the third of them makes much of an impression at all, and that’s not because it’s any less messy and incoherent than the others, but because it involves unexpected death.

Even the demise of a major character has only a momentary effect, however, because none of the five team members emerges as a fully-rounded figure, and it’s impossible to invest emotionally in any of them. It’s a problem of the actors as well as the writing, however. Hemsworth swaggers through the picture with a sullen, pugnacious air that’s supposed to hide Hathaway’s hidden good-guy vulnerability, but the result is as drab as the washed-out visuals. And while Davis and McCallany bring a bit of energy to the proceedings, both Chinese performers are disappointing. Wang Leehom is mostly briskly impassive, and Tang Wei is hobbled by her obvious difficulty with English—she sounds as though she’s reciting the lines phonetically, with marbles in her mouth to boot. But that’s not the only reason why Chen Lien’s romantic involvement with Hathaway never resonates. Not only is it tossed willy-nilly into the action plot, but there’s simply no chemistry between the stars. As for the villains, Coster’s Kasar isn’t a stereotypical Russian gangster (he’s identified as an erstwhile Lebanese Christian Phalangist ), but he certainly feels like one; and in lieu of a truly memorable mastermind of Bondian proportions, the script gives us a pallid facsimile in the person of Yorick van Wageningen. (Oh, were Donald Pleasance still around—he could have had some fun with the part.) The various other American and Chinese officials scattered about the plot have little to do, which is why actors like Jon Ortiz and William Mapother are wasted playing a couple of them.

Perhaps somebody will finally figure out a way of making a tale of cybercrime compelling, but Mann’s mixture of glitzy computer screens and badly staged spy-movie action sequences certainly doesn’t do the job. Though it deals with a kind of threat that should keep us on the edge of our seats, “Blackhat” proves old-hat, an unimaginative take on a cutting-edge subject that comes off both ludicrous and boring.