-By David Noh

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“You gotta have friends” said an old beloved song of Bette Midler’s, but Chris Mason Johnson’s The New Twenty definitely calls that idea into question. The film focuses on a group of buds, seven years after college, all facing the big 3-0 with varying degrees of trepidation, including Julie (Nicole Bilderback) and her fiancé, Andrew (Ryan Locke), both successful in business. They prop up the morale of the group’s “losers”: Julie’s gay brother Tony (Andrew Wei Lin); Ben (Colin Fickes), also gay, overweight and terribly alone; and Felix (Thomas Sadoski), who is straight and taking a whole lotta drugs to get over losing Julie. When Andrew meets Louie (Terry Serpico), an obnoxious alpha-male who talks him into a start-up company, the future looks bright, job-wise, for Tony and Ben, but disappointment inevitably follows.

Johnson tries for a brisk, hard-edged view of Manhattanites bustling around a yupped-out, eager-beaver world which already seems finished, given the recent economic downturn. This is never clearer than in a moment in which Julie confesses she got her job because she told a horny would-be employer that she had “Merrill Lynch” tattooed across one breast. Johnson favors trendy, rapid-fire dialogue which is unfortunately short on wit, with characters saying things like “I’m having trouble computing you totally, dude,” while their inevitable Internet banter consists of “Friends: a nice finish I agree but Seinfeld: where was the love?”

The more poignant moments likewise fall flat, and Johnson‘s awkwardness is never more apparent than in a mushy subplot involving Tony’s romance with an HIV-positive professor (Bill Sage), or Felix’s noncommittal relationship with a largely silent lass (Cordelia Reynolds), referred to at one point as “Last Tango” (right, in their dreams!). There’s only so much preppie melancholy you can take, watching them sitting on rooftops, beer in hand, staring off into space. In Ben’s case, for instance, you wish he would just get his sorry ass off the couch and go to one of New York’s numerous “bear” parties, where’d he’d doubtlessly be Scarlett O’Hara at the barbecue. There’s even a queasy Hays Code kind of moralizing in the sequence of Ben’s bachelor party, which starts off all high and horny and ends with everyone paying direly for their sins. Things are not helped by cheap-looking cinematography, with ho-hum time-lapse views of the skyline, and a predictable, intrusive music score.

The actors do what they can, given the sketchily conceived archetypes they have to play. Mason and co-writer Ishmael Chawla would have done better with fewer pithy, pallid wisecracks and more focus on original character arcs. Bilderback, known as the “Asian chick” from Clueless, Can’t Hardly Wait, Bring It On, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Dawson’s Creek,” gives the most interesting, complex performance and has a lot of the better lines: “They keep promoting me. It’s just a quota: Every bank needs one sexy Asian chick.” (Ouch…that pesky, former zeitgeist again!)