David Denby must be depressed. A year after the film critic spent 5,000 words in The New Yorker lamenting the dubious direction in which the many apostles of the Judd Apatow School of Lewdness are taking his beloved romantic comedy, here comes Zack and Miri Make a Porno adhering to Apatow’s formula with such obvious admiration that its creator might as well get on his knees and start fellating right now.

If this metaphor sounds lewd, it’s apt for this movie, which basks in every slimy four letter utterance. But lewdness does not equal freshness, and unfortunately there’s little fresh to be found in Zack and Miri. It’s that same hip combo of crude male-centric slapstick with a sensitive heart—of Seth Rogen as the doughy, ambitionless slacker growing up to snag the improbably gorgeous blonde, in this case the sharp-tongued yet lovely Elizabeth Banks.

The whole concept—Zack and Miri as grown-up childhood friends producing a porno to relieve their mounting debts—is a secondhand vehicle for the type of sex-inflected romantic comedy pioneered by Apatow and his buddies in movies like Knocked Up and The 40 Year Old Virgin.

Which brings us to this movie’s saving grace and its most confounding dilemma: that it was created by Kevin Smith, whose movies have been lewdly hilarious since Judd Apatow was still writing episodes for The Larry Sanders Show (let’s forget, for the moment, the black stain on Mr. Smith’s past that is Jersey Girl).

It’s a little jarring to see Smith fawning over Apatow’s brand, especially when one considers that his earlier movies—Clerks, Mallrats, etc.—probably had just as much influence on Apatow’s first efforts. Zack and Miri, with its parody porn clichés and dirty one-liners, has little of the wit that made those earlier movies so memorable, and none of the emotional plausibility that gives Apatow’s movies such universal appeal.

But that doesn’t stop it from being absurdly funny much of the time. The buddy dynamics of the film crew, the coffee shop porn scenarios, Jason Mewes lisping hoarsely while play-fornicating with real-life porn stars Traci Lords and Katie Morgan—it all just barely hangs together, and you’ll smirk even as you slap your forehead at the queasiest, cheesiest romantic comedy contrivances.

This is easy money for Kevin Smith: borrow someone else’s winning formula, add Smithian signatures (Star Wars references, Randal from Clerks), subtract Bennifer, stir in curses and slapstick sex, sprinkle in some popular actors, cash the checks. In this sense, Zack and Miri doesn’t try too hard, and doesn’t excel nor disappoint. But is it so wrong of me to ask for something a little more ambitious from the man who once gave us the brilliance of Dogma?