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'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy': Thumb way up — and out

Whether or not you like The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, based on the late Douglas Adams' cult classic novel, comes down to whether or not it's your kind of weird.

You know how there are people who hate Napoleon Dynamite because they think it's weird and stupid, and also those who just love it to pieces precisely because it is weird and stupid? It's the same thing with, say, Monty Python movies or Seinfeld. While Napoleon and Seinfeld were funny, they just were not my kind of weird, while Python's sublime silliness truly is.

Touchstone Pictures 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' The verdict: Hitch a ride on the weird side. Director: Garth Jennings Starring: Bill Bailey, Anna Chancellor, Warwick Davis, Martin Freeman, John Malkovich Run time: 110 minutes Release date: April 29, 2005 Rating: PG for thematic elements, action and mild language. See showtimes On the web Official movie site View the trailer    Trailers require Quicktime Rate "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"   Go see it   Make it a matinee   Wait to rent   Don't bother Voter Limit: Once per Hour View Poll Results

Why? I dunno, and I suspect that answer would take a lot more therapy than my insurance is gonna pay for. But Hitchhiker's, an occasionally slow but almost always witty jaunt through space, the meaning of life and unbearably bad alien poetry, is undeniably odd, too odd for the folks that cut out not far into the preview screening I went to.

But even at its uneven moments, it was fascinatingly weird enough, in a touching, breathlessly droll way, that made it impossible not to love.

And y'all know I don't love much.

Hitchhiker's is the story of hapless Brit Arthur Dent (The Office's Martin Freeman) who thinks he's having the worst day in the world because his charming little house is about to be bulldozed to make way for a road.

He's wrong. This day's awful because the whole planet's about to be demolished to make way for an intergalactic thoroughfare of some kind. Luckily, Arthur's whisked off the Earth by his friend Ford Prefect (Mos Def), who he's always known was kind of odd but is actually an alien.

The two hitch a ride on the ship of the Vogons, the evil, unpleasant hordes that have just blown up Arthur's home planet. They're something like Jabba the Hut crossed with the world's crankiest English banker. The understandably confused Arthur, still in his bathrobe, has to simultaneously digest the destruction of his home and everybody on it, the existence of aliens, and the reality that many of them are trying to kill him.

I was instantly hooked because a) I'd read some of Adams' books in college and b) because after seven years of watching movies for a living, I'm charmed by anything resembling wit, originality or a concept not based on a video game or some focus group's idea of special. There's such clever, droll detail in the script, like the matter-of-fact, verrry British explanations of the all-important Guide, which explains the particulars of species and planets the travelers encounter.

After escaping the Vogons, Arthur and Ford are accidentally rescued by the ship Heart of Gold, which has been stolen by daft preeny-boy Zaphod Beeblebrox (Sam Rockwell), the president of the galaxy, who sports fetching sun-kissed highlights and not one but two brains, neither of which is all that bright.

Also aboard the Heart of Gold are Beeblebrox's smarter girlfriend Trillian (Zooey Deschanel), the adventure-craving human that Arthur tried, unsuccessfully, to pick up not long before the planet went kablooey, and Marvin (body by Warwick Davis, voice by Alan Rickman), a depressed robot who gloomily informs the passengers of impending doom. He's like an intergalactic Eeyore. (And not for nothing, but wouldn't Intergalactic Eeyore be an awesome band name?)

There are times when director Garth Jennings beats us a little hard with the Cutesy Stick, making the droll a little more cloying than it needs to be. But the actors walk a fine line between studiously over-the-top and Robin-Williams-on-Mountain-Dew frantic. Mos Def, who got an Emmy for his serious work in HBO's Something The Lord Made, revisits the light comic chops he showed off as the demolition expert in The Italian Job, and Freeman, who you might remember as the porn stand-in in the way-too-long bit in Love Actually, wears his polite British befuddlement well.

Another refugee from British comedies, Anna Chancellor, shows up as the galaxy's vice president, the efficient Questular Rontok, who carries something of a torch for her dumb-dumb running mate. Chancellor's made quite a career as strong-willed and sometimes shady British women who lose their dudes to loopy, hippie-dippy Americans (see Four Weddings and A Funeral and What A Girl Wants.) She has a really funny bit here where she explains why Trillian, her rival for Beeblebrox's affections, must be guilty of something. (It has something to do with how skinny she is. Ha!)

But if you see Hitchhiker's — and you really should — keep your eye out for Rockwell, who's perfected sleazy-smarmy charm in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Galaxy Quest and Matchstick Men, and has burnished it to a Vegasy, who-loves-ya-baby sheen. Everything Beeblebrox says is either a come-on, an excuse or an attempt to weasel his way into or out of something. In short, he's a heck of a politician. And he's in one heck of a movie — a weird one, but a good one.

The Flick Chick's Bottom Line: Hitch a ride on the weird side.