CONSIDER THE fact that Matthew McConaughey—loved by many, hated by many more—has never starred in a “serious” movie, and you’ll have a good idea where to start with Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (Warner Bros). McConaughey has made a career of playing shirtless boyfriends with varying degrees of intelligence. He hasn’t played them badly, just predictably, bringing along assured commercial success whenever his face—and even more when his chest—is on the billboards. Women dig his southern drawl and California attitude, meaning plenty of them will be dragging boyfriends present and future out this weekend to watch him be thoroughly and repeatedly pwned by his aggrieved exes.

The girlfriends will get two things from this unabashedly estrogen-fueled comedy that we're led to believe ladies always love: 1) to laugh at and be aroused by a smotheringly attractive man as he struts around being an pompous jerk, and 2) to watch him fall to the feminine fantasy of romance—pictures in wallets for twenty years, reunions on the spot of that first childhood kiss, and best of all, lots and lots of apologies. Apologies are kind of what Ghosts of Girlfriends Past is all about, what with its badly-executed Christmas Carol self-tourism and its determination to make McConaughey look as reprehensible as possible while still somehow insisting he’s the good guy. When he commits his great, snow-dusted act of salvation in the movie’s climax, his usual, radiant self is back instantaneously. But we knew he’d show up eventually, didn’t we? He’d been right under the surface of this other, darker guy the whole time, just waiting for his chance to burst out like the sunrise over the Pacific.

Connor Mead (McConaughey) is a fashion photographer after Hugh Hefner’s own heart. We first see him dump three women at once over a videoconference call—“appetizers,” he explains to the “main course,” the scantily-clad subject of his latest cover shoot. But he hasn’t always been such a bastard: rumor has it that he loved little Jenny Perotti (Jennifer Garner) until she grew up and finally, frustrated with his hesitance, kissed a boy and liked it. That’s when his greasy uncle Wayne pulled up in his convertible and taught him how to shoot whiskey and use “reflective surfaces” to survey the surrounding beauties.

From there, Connor became a fast machine, humping and dumping enough women to make up the army of ghosts that he meets during his Dickensian time travels. Those back-and-forth forays make the movie both messy and not very funny: where there could have been hilariously awkward encounters with his former self, we’re instead forced to watch McConaughey hem, haw, and pretend to be humiliated (spoiler alert: he’s not very good at it). Top that with an obnoxious, pointless performance by the always-cute Emma Stone, playing frumpy girl from the 80s with whom Connor shared his first sexual encounter, and a baffling luminescent elf-queen as the “ghost of girlfriends future.” There’s nothing a bit believable about Connor’s trips through his youth, led by the inexplicably repentant ghost of Uncle Wayne. (Why, locked away in a ghost heaven that seems to resemble the Playboy Mansion, has he decided love and commitment are suddenly where it’s at?)

The movie’s one bright spot is the lovely Jennifer Garner, who deserves a whole lot better than this. Her Jenny is forced to stand virtually on the sidelines—and momentarily in the arms of a Barack Obama lookalike—as her childhood crush burns out his decades-long tantrum, waiting patiently, tearfully until he finally decides to get over himself. Thankfully, the screenwriters made up for her wallflower role by giving her a some sharp wits: her battles-of-the-one-liner with McConaughey are the most watchable scenes, and we’re made to feel that she ultimately triumphs in the tired rom-com/bro-com struggle between promiscuity and commitment. Too bad her ultimate victory comes, if you can believe it, at a wedding, on the very spot where Connor snapped his first Polaroid of her, which he is holding in his hand at that very moment. Everything ends where it began. Oh, whoops, clumsy me. I think I just gave away the ending.