FAT was a feminist issue. Now the gurus of gross-out comedy, Bobby and Peter Farrelly, have their say, with surprisingly tender and sentimental results.

Rather than poking fun at obesity, they confound expectations and the previous rules of dumb, adolescent comedy by making a plea to look beneath the yards of lard. Supermodel-thin may be the magazine ideal but big and wobbly can be beautiful too, and inner beauty more beautiful still.

Yes, the Farrelly Brothers really are being serious for a moment in a mocking yet optimistic comedy romance with more heart and warmth and fewer jokes than before.

Not that they have turned politically correct all of a sudden. Bad taste still has its place, down the pecking order maybe, but present in the conduct of Hal.

Hal (Jack Black) is indeed shallow, smug, chubby, in love with himself and in thrall to his late clergyman father's last piece of advice that he should chase only the hottest totty.

Alas for Hal, he has more ego and front than looks, brain power or dance-floor magnetism and the same goes for his equally deluded, equally lonely, toupee-wearing drinking pal, Mauricio (an unctuous Jason Alexander).

A chance encounter with TV self-help expert Tony Robbins (sending himself up) leads to hypnosis, and the planting of a subconscious desire in Hal to look beyond the cosmetic for inner loveliness.

Whoosh, the newly politically right-on Hal falls for deeply insecure nurse Rosemary, the walrus-sized daughter of his millionaire Irish boss. To everyone else, there's a whole lotta Rosie (to purloin an AC/DC title) but Hal sees only a whippet-slim vision of her inner self (Gwyneth Paltrow, with what looks to be a larger mantelpiece than usual).

Paltrow plays both thin and fat, waddling about in a body suit to broaden her range with all the enthusiasm that Cameron Diaz brought to the Farrellys' grossest work of all, There's Something About Mary. Insecurity suits her, as it did in Sliding Doors and Shakespeare In Love, but she is less assured than Diaz when the Farrellys revert to dumb slapstick, collapsing-chair clichs and all.

Jack Black, meanwhile, succeeds in making himself both unlovely and loveable, often at the same time.

Yet this grave new world for the Farrellys leaves them at half strength and half throttle. Shallow Hal is too sweet, too nice, too inoffensive for its dig at hypocrisy to hit home, and many of the jokes lack the audacious punch of old.

Updated: 08:55 Friday, February 01, 2002