Boat Trip (2003)

Image credit: Boat Trip: Astrid Wirth

STRAIGHT TRIPPIN' Gooding and Fox drown in a sea of outdated gags

I thought Cuba Gooding Jr. couldn't blow his Oscar cred more profligately than he did last year in the pandering black-guy-lost-among-white-folks comedy ''Snow Dogs.'' I was wrong. In the titanically bad straight-guy-lost-among-homosexual-folks comedy Boat Trip, Gooding plays Jerry, a glum galoot recently dumped by his girlfriend (Vivica A. Fox) who realizes only after the boat has sailed that the recuperative cruise he's embarked on with his boorish, skirt-chasing buddy Nick (Horatio Sanz) is for gay men. And had the ghost of Paul Lynde swanned by in a caftan-clad cameo, you couldn't find a more outdated, miscalculated collection of stale, queen-size stereotypes than those trotted out on this ship of fools.

At first the pair are afraid the proximity will, as Homer Simpson might say, ''give them gay.'' Then Jerry has to stay fake-gay when he falls for the shipboard dance instructor (Roselyn Sanchez), in order to maintain her trust. (To even mention ''Some Like It Hot'' in the same sentence as this desperate imitation is a violation.) ''Boat Trip'' displays the hammering structure of a 30-minute TV episode -- and, indeed, it was cowritten and directed by Mort Nathan, a veteran sitcom writer and producer (''The Golden Girls''). But unless their names are Frasier and Niles Crane, no men can survive such a shipwreck as this one.