Kevin Smith’s "Jersey Girl," starring Ben Affleck ¾ with an extended cameo from Jennifer Lopez ¾ is, thank heavens, no "Gigli." Instead, in telling the story of a self-absorbed publicist turned reluctant single father, it’s a familiar tale that feels in some way like a Smith sell-out: a feel-good formula about fathers and children, frequently spiked with witty dialogue that doesn’t quite transcend its by-the-numbers plot as much as fills it in with charm and some big laughs.

Opening in Manhattan circa 1994, hotshot music publicist Ollie Trinke (Affleck) has a huge career and beautiful new wife (Jennifer Lopez). They’re an uptown power couple in the making, expecting a baby when she abruptly dies in childbirth. Shell-shocked Ollie moves to the Jersey burbs with his salty, working class dad (George Carlin), and has a very public meltdown on new client, "Fresh Prince" Will Smith (in one of the film’s best running gags and cameos), inadvertently ending his career. Six years later street cleaner Ollie is stuck under his father’s roof with daughter Gertie (Raquel Castro, in the Dakota Fanning role) in tow. Up until this point, the film has been entertaining in a button-pushing, routine, pop music blasting on the soundtrack kind of way, bathed in luscious Manhattan cinematography by the great Vilmos Zsigmond (shooting a Kevin Smith film!).

Just as the formula starts to wear on you, something interesting happens to "Jersey Girl": Liv Tyler steps into the film and energizes every scene she’s in. Things start changing for celibate Ollie after meeting Maya (Liv Tyler), a video store clerk, matter-of-factly researching the sex habits of men and porn. The two begin a reluctant and very funny almost-courtship, and that’s where "Jersey Girl" becomes the most fun and where the old Kevin Smith, who writes clerks better than anyone, gives comfortable Tyler some ripely funny and original dialogue.

One very funny scene is set in a diner where Maya probes Ollie’s sexual habits, insisting that they experiment with (wish fulfillment) casual sex. When Ollie objects on the grounds of 7-year celibacy, and he’s resigned to masturbation, Maya gets one of the film’s best howlers and a great seduction line, telling Ollie that it’s the same exact thing, except "someone else is doing the rubbing and you save yourself the two dollar rental fee."

It goes without saying that eventually everyone will come together at the now-cliché school pageant, and it will be revealed to everyone just What Is Important In Life—surprise—family, not money and career.

"Jersey Girl" is an amiable enough comedy that gets by on a little acting charm but feels uncomfortably like Kevin Smith (patron saint of indie-hip cool) has made some compromises. The father-daughter, father-son stuff is standard issue and no amount of charm by the cast is going to cover the safety-zone feel of it all. Where has Smith’s raunchy comic zeal gone? Since he executive produced, wrote and directed, and this is a Miramax film, why does it feel like a routine Hollywood gloss-job?