Ridiculous, obnoxious and astonishingly tedious, "Gigli" (pronounced "Geelee" as in "really awful") is so unremittingly dreadful it sounds like fun. Until, that is, you actually spend 120 minutes in its presence and realise that having your skin flayed by a potato peeler would be less painful. Not to mention less time-consuming.

Playing a pair of "contractors" hired by the Mafia to kidnap the mentally-challenged teenage brother (Justin Bartha) of a public prosecutor, Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck get to bicker, fight, and (eventually) make out.

Making that other cinematic love-in, "Swept Away", look like nothing worse than a momentary lapse of judgement on the part of Madge and Guy, "Gigli" is two hours of pure dross enlivened only by the inane excesses of the script's forays into la-la-land.

Any movie in which J-Lo plays a lesbian and Affleck seduces her by mooing like a cow can't be all bad, can it? And surely the scene in which Lopez practises her yoga while rhapsodising in explicit detail about the pleasures of her womanhood must be worth a couple of stars for cult value alone?

Well, no, actually. Trading on a few shameless walk-on-walk-off shameos from Christopher Walken and Al Pacino, and the (empty) promise of letting us see what happens between the sheets chez Jen and Ben, "Gigli" delivers nothing except the unmistakable whiff of an absolute stinker.

In what is by far the movie's best scene, Lopez's lethal lady squares up against a gang of hostile thugs, intimidating them with a story about a martial arts move that enables her to gouge out someone's eyeballs with her thumb, while destroying their visual cortex so that they lose all memory of everything they've seen during the course of their lifetime.

"Gigli" is so horrendous, you'll start to wonder if such wounds can be successfully self-inflicted in the darkness of the cinema auditorium.