The movie works fairly well as a pitch-dark comedy, and very well as a dead-on satire of upward mobility and its discontents.

The laughs tend to come in fits and starts, built around individual set pieces rather than being generated organically out of the storytelling.

Even the relatively successful pairing of neckless maestro of anxiety Stiller with the indomitably effervescent Black gets bogged down by Steve Adams' aimless screenplay. Would the Barry Levinson who once made "Diner" please wake up and pull himself together?

Levinson, who has directed enough films to know better, should recognize a stinker of a script when he smells one: Instead clever laughs he serves up sloppy schtick, dead spots filled with lame ad-libbing and Walken crooning "The Happy Wanderer."

Envy is a shaggy dog-poop story that'll make you wish you could spray something at the screen to make it disappear.