by MATTHEW HAYS

Though filmmaker Neil LaBute has taken a break from his special cinematic brand of gender-war commentary with his last couple of films, he returns to the form with this week's release, The Shape of Things. Here, he has two college-age couples circle each other, size each other up and play some wicked mind games.

Central to the film (based on LaBute's own play of the same name) is Rachel Weisz, who plays an uppity, PC-type feminist culture vulture. She meets up with the rather nerdy Paul Rudd in the local art gallery, where he works part time. She's about to deface a piece of sculpture with her own guerilla feminist message, and he intervenes. They end up falling in love.

She, the cool one, attempts to morph and shape Rudd into her own image. He needs to lose weight, get a proper haircut, shed some of those geekish clothes and, in general, to get with the program. His friends are pretty horrified at the way Weisz is going about running down some sort of checklist makeover for Rudd, but hey, he seems to be into what amounts to a not-so-subtle pussy whipping, so what the hell.

The Shape of Things is by no means a terrible movie; LaBute is too clever a man to make a bad film. But it feels like an odd hiccup from his past. In '97 he wowed the indie crowd with his In the Company of Men, a career-making debut in which the gender wars were especially nasty. That was six years ago, however, and even then, it felt like he was commenting on the last gasp of a cultural obsession with gender identity politics. This film is such a throwback, I got the sense that when LaBute was taking breaks from writing the screenplay he must have been masturbating while fantasizing about Camille Paglia.

This film plays itself out as a vague inversion of In the Company of Men, its gender dynamic worn out and tired. From LaBute, I expected something fresher and infinitely more trailblazing.

The Shape of Things opens Friday, May 16

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