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Writer/director Brad Silberling ("Moonlight Mile") creates an ostensibly improvised comedy that fails to stir laughs or insight by way of its singular cult-of-personality narrative device. Named simply "Him," Morgan Freeman plays a loose version of himself as an actor hanging out in a downtown L.A. grocery store for nascent research on a film project. He befriends a store cashier named Scarlet (Paz Vega) and takes her on a spontaneous and existential journey through his personal philosophies on health, happiness and survival. While Freeman and Vega are mildly entertaining, the story is too safe and precious to elicit anything more than a passing sense of amusement.

Rated R. 82 mins. (D+) (One Star)