Hearts jaded by rom-com formula perhaps beat a little faster when confronted with the gender-opposite of He's Just Not That Into You.

While that movie proved to be a romantic stinker, it's premise promised a lot more...even if it was squandered by an over-emoting squad of losers-in-love.

Unfortunately, unabashedly indie heartstring-yanker 500 Days of Summer- while mercifully rejecting the rom-com template - is less than the sum of its well-played parts.

Zooey Deschanel plays Summer, a doe-eyed hippie chick who's "just not that into" Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Tom, a frustrated architect-turned-greetings card writer.

This despite the fact that she's everything Tom wants in a woman - sharp, sassy, witty, bright and breezy. Heck, she's even happy to prat about in IKEA.

Perhaps, he should have taken the hint when Summer opined on their first date that she didn't believe in true love. It's a viewpoint that tends to put a damper on newly-unleashed hopes of kismet.

Anyway, while manically dotting about the five hundred days that the couple persevered with their doomed relationship, debut director Marc Webb hopes to put a novel spin on the genre.

And he does...to a degree. The trouble is the sharp, often insightful, writing flails when set inside the madcap to-and-fro of the plot. You just don't know where you are.

More successful is Webb's clever use of the split screen to show Tom's naive imagination conjuring up what he hopes would happen against the emotionally grim reality.

Ultimately, the puppyish Tom's hopeless romantic stays that way...while Deschanel's kooky commitment phobe suddenly discovers that true love does exist. The trouble is, not with Tom.

All in all, a neat idea is only sporadically served by a script that makes this a summer of discontent.

Tim Evans