A Pyromaniac's Love Story appears to have been written not on a word processor, but in an arts and crafts class. The writer took "The Gift of the Magi," folded it in half, folded it in half again, and then used scissors to cut out half a heart along the main crease. When he unfolded his handiwork, he had A Pyromaniac's Love Story, which he promptly showed to God. And God said it was good . . . because God can be pretty sarcastic sometimes.

A Pyromaniac's Love Story is a humorless farce about the many ways in which people make sacrifices for one another in order to 1) prove their love to their beloved; or 2) prove their love to themselves; or 3) stay busy. If Moliere had been lobotomized and given roughly half an hour to produce a story about a bakery that burned down, I'm pretty sure that he could have done better than this.

Our protagonist is a young man named Sergio who is a protagonist in the ancient Egyptian (or perhaps Icelandic--scholars disagree) sense of the word: "the-character-that-audiences-spend-the-most-time-hoping-to-see-die." John Leguizamo's portrayal of Sergio hinges on an enthusiastic blandness that speaks volumes. It doesn't tell us anything about Sergio, but it certainly indicates that Leguizamo wants to be considered for Disney films and other G-rated projects. His performance is a celebration of the inoffensive, an ode to the innocuous. Long live the boy whose heart is in the right place, but who nevertheless has to break the rules in order to learn his lesson about the importance of playing by the rules!

The central event of the story is the fate of Mr. Linzer's bakery. Sergio works for Mr. Linzer and hopes one day to be the manager of the store and to marry Hatti, the girl of his dreams. But Mr. Linzer tells Sergio that the bakery is losing money and asks his young assistant to burn the store down for the insurance money. Somewhere between his selfish desire to inherit the store and his failure to understand Mr. Linzer's financial troubles, Sergio stumbles onto a fit of righteous indignation. "But this store is everything," Sergio protests. "It's your whole life. You can't burn it down. You just can't."

Not long thereafter, the store burns down. But who is to blame? Did Segio do it for Mr. Linzer? Did Mr. Linzer do it in order to provide a comfortable retirement for Mrs. Linzer? Or did some narcissistic stranger named Garret (William Baldwin) with a bad leg and a broken heart and scads and scads of cash do it?

Obviously, I can't put anything over on you, you clever reader. Something tells you it's the last one, doesn't it? But you'll never be able to convince the cops of Garret's guilt because there are too many other people willing to confess to the crime. Segio is paid by Garret's obscenely wealthy father to take the blame for Garret's pyromaniacal act. But Mr. Linzer confesses in order to get Sergio out of jail. And then Mrs. Linzer confesses in order to save her husband.

I'm sure I would have laughed at all of these antics, since they're obviously HI-larious, but I guess I just got a little caught up in the incredible love that all of the characters demonstrate for one another. It's downright heartwarming, only you won't manage to feel your heart warming up because you'll keep thinking that something really funny is going to happen. Maybe that's the best way to account for this film's dismal failure to entertain on any level. It's so overwhelmingly heartwarming and so unbelievably funny that our two different reactions to it sort of cancel one another out and leave us feeling . . . hungry, perhaps, for something from a bakery that hasn't burned down.

Apart from being perhaps too funny and too heartwarming, A Pyromaniac's Love Story articulates some very important messages--messages that are particularly important for our youngsters today. We learn, for instance, that not all rich people are evil. We also learn that Puerto Rican men are innately lovable. We also learn that love--true love--is eternal . . . as long as we keep a picture of our beloved with us for those confounding moments when we forget what she looks like. But the most important lesson is that if you're an extremely wealthy blond woman, you can always barge into bakeries and restaurants after they're closed and be very rude to the hard-working people who are trying to get home and charm them into letting you steal things from their stores because it's important for wealthy people to steal in order to retain their wealth. These are valuable lessons that Hollywood has been doing a poor job of inculcating in the up-and-coming generation, and I certainly recommend this movie for parents struggling valiantly to raise the kind of brain dead children that will someday help to make America an even happier and more productive nation.

On The Simpsons, Lisa subscribes to a magazine entitled Non-Threatening Boys. Perhaps the most beautiful thing about A Pyromaniac's Love Story is not Leguizamo's compellingly antiseptic portrayal of the archetypal non-threatening boy, but the fact that the screenplay itself must have been produced by a collaboration between N'Sync and Ricky Martin. I heartily recommend this film for pedophiles who want to get their preteen victims into the mood for a good old-fashioned cuddle.

Recommended: No