“A Lot Like Love” is actually a lot like many so-called chick flicks, relying heavily on chance encounters and the chemistry of the cast to fuel the movie.

But “A Lot Like Love” is perhaps too comfortable with the conventions of the romance genre and too lazy with its script. As a result, the movie only succeeds in creating a silencing indifference toward its characters.

“A Lot Like Love” follows two people through an on-and-off romance over the course of seven years. Ashton Kutcher plays Oliver, a young man who insists on having “all his ducks in a line,” despite the facts that the phrase is “all his ducks in a row” and that he doesn’t know what he wants out of life.

Amanda Peet plays Emily, a spontaneous young woman who succeeds in showing Oliver the error in his planned existence. The setup here is already problematic with Ashton Kutcher playing the straight man.

The chance encounters that follow between Oliver and Emily are brutally transparent. Soon, Emily and Oliver turn up on each other’s doorsteps without so much as an explanation on how they found one another. In seven years, Oliver and Emily relocate everywhere across the country, from New York to Los Angeles to San Francisco, but the two always seem to be conveniently within driving distance of each other.

The film is further impeded by a general lack of supporting cast. This is mainly because of the time-spanning and destination-sprawling nature of the script.

Sure, Ali Larter (“Final Destination”) and Kal Penn (“Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle”) are in the movie, but they might as well have been cast as walk-on cameo roles. A stable supporting cast might have broken the monotony between Kutcher and Peet because they don’t have enough chemistry to save the film.

Kutcher and Peet both compensate by spitting on each other and sticking random objects up their noses, which seems to be the real crux of the film.

By the end, the film became a disjointed track of nervous chuckles, with any true laughs too far and few between. The movie even tries to revise its own continuity in an attempt to better the end result.

Just minutes before the glorious credits begin to roll, the movie resorts to repeating past jokes in an effort to revive any scattered interest at all.

Ultimately, I suspect this film is more of a cheap attempt to cash in on Kutcher’s newly established film career than anything else. With a weak script, no supporting cast and worst of all, no humor, “A Lot Like Love” makes “Guess Who” look like a gem – which just might be the film’s true purpose.