It seems sublimely coincidental that the release of Clare Kilner’s tepid romantic comedy “The Wedding Date” should happen to coincide with the perennially hateful Valentine’s Day. Both are essentially the same cultural monstrosity: a predictably boring and expensive foray into the most pedestrian definition of love. If it manages to accomplish anything remotely original, “The Wedding Date” at least serves as a poster child for the crass derivations of commercial romance that we barter at an outrageous price. Congratulations oppressed loners and moviegoers alike! For the sake of emotional brevity, you can consolidate and direct your enmity to Debra Messing’s scarlet mop of hair.

Anyone who expects this movie to possess cinematic integrity is clearly out of her — “his” is farfetched — mind. The poster alone illustrates the entire narrative in one mind-numbingly boring image: With their congealed smiles and fluid postures, the beaming Debra Messing and Dermot Mulroney seem caught in an erectile dysfunction advertisement. But even Redbook aficionados left the theater unfulfilled — “Yeah, it was cute,” an anonymous middle-aged woman conceded while approaching the exit.

The flimsy plot commences with a cascading display of CGI rose petals and a blue pen rapidly circling pages of male escort ads. The film quickly cuts to Debra Messing’s transparent attempt at nervousness for her upcoming illicit date. Kat (Messing), is a busy red-headed career woman living in an exquisitely decorated apartment in Manhattan. While this may seem — and is — identical to the set-up of “Will and Grace,” there exists one difference: Kat’s existence is devoid of boxer-brief clad homosexuals.

In fact, Kat has no man in her life at all, a problem made worse by her sister’s approaching wedding (the grave where bad romantic comedies go to die). She doesn’t want to be the conspicuously single loser that everyone gossips about over gurgling glasses of champagne, so she solves her problem like any other rational human being and rents a hooker.

Director Clare Kilner has a glowing window of opportunity to make clever allusions to the film’s inverse “Pretty Woman” plot, though it is regrettably lost. After sighing over pictures of her chiseled ex-boyfriend, Kat packs her pride into robin’s egg blue luggage and heads for the wedding. Aboard the plane, Dermot Mulroney — the ideal male escort — flashes a wooden smile at Kat and, thankfully, into the camera. Peals of “aw!” arose from a chorus of teenage girls in the audience, to this reviewer’s shock.

In a later failed joke, Kat refers to David (Mulroney) as a Yoda figure. With his seemingly endless supply of useless aphorisms, he is damn near close to Yoda’s sage-like wisdom. (When Kat frets over what to wear to the wedding, he numbly injects, “Let me teach you a trick – if you look people in the eye, they’ll never know what you’re wearing.”)

Pathetic advice aside, Mulroney manages to be overwhelmingly boring throughout the entirety of the film. While he impresses the roving crowds of drunk blue-bloods at the wedding reception, and even provides gratis sexual gratification to Kat in her father’s boat, he never manages to break his lackluster demeanor. David was most likely intended to be some sort of sage who bestows life-changing wisdom to his troubled date and the troubled Britons. But the wedding date, and “The Wedding Date,” has the emotional depth of a GQ fashion ad, only with a more pallid wardrobe.

Kat’s family exquisitely completes the film’s tortured character list with a medley of flat clichés and nuisances. Her mother had expected Kat to marry before her sister — a tragically whiny blonde — and divulges her disappointment in a drunken reception speech. While we are supposed to empathize with Kat, the speech is so predictable and derivative that the screenwriter (Dana Fox, in a not-so-impressive debut) absorbs all the shame.

And, surprise of surprises, things don’t end that badly for Kat. Through David and her crass Cockney friend, perhaps the only tolerable facet of the film, Kat slowly overcomes the bitterness of her former breakup and falls for her tall, dark and lame prostitute.

While there is a slight hiccup in Kat’s happiness — her ex slept with her sister! — which gives her a reason to forlornly walk in the rain, the plot contentedly aligns itself on the track to happy-ending delirium. (And, thank God, Kat’s hooker turns out to be a Brown graduate.)

Perhaps the most insufferable feature of the film is its debilitating mediocrity. From its CGI petals to its cardboard-cutout characters, “The Wedding Date” settles for a beige-on-gray banality that is crushingly under-whelming.

Is there any way to remedy such boredom? Other than promptly sneaking into the 7:30 showing of “Million Dollar Baby” — no.