It was all a big misunderstanding. Caught simultaneously groping Carmen Electra and Molly Shannon at the foot of the bed? Just checking for breast cancer. Caught from behind making jerk-off motions with Tara Reid's panties dangling from your finger? It was just a fugitive mouse scurrying through Reid's purse (hence, the panties) and into your button-down shirt. Really, what else could it be? A little common sense might have sorted out all of these improbable situations, or kept them from happening in the first place. Yet these moldy sight gags are the fine tissue that connects My Boss's Daughter, an abysmal screwball comedy that relies heavily on idiocy from both sides of the screen. After logging some hard time on the studio shelf, the film has presumably escaped the straight-to-video route due to the surging popularity of Ashton Kutcher, who should consider himself punk'd by his own ephemeral celebrity. While much of the blame for this mirthless variation on The Apartment belongs to screenwriter David Dorfman (Anger Management) and director David Zucker (Airplane!), Kutcher isn't exactly Jack Lemmon, either. Wearing a near-constant mask of dazed bewilderment, his sleepwalking straight man can't keep Dorfman's madcap characters in orbit, sending an already mismanaged ensemble into all-out chaos. For reasons too convoluted to dignify with an explanation, low-level publishing lackey Kutcher agrees to housesit for callous boss Terence Stamp, hoping the gesture will help land him a big promotion and get him closer to Stamp's daughter Reid. Left with simple instructions to care for Stamp's pet owl and not allow anyone into his immaculate house, Kutcher immediately bungles when uninvited guests come out of the woodwork. The chief offenders are Shannon, a disgruntled ex-employee who brings her friends (Electra and David Koechner) along to party, and Stamp's estranged son Andy Richter, a former drug dealer on the run from lowlife thug Michael Madsen. The sleepy owl, meanwhile, doesn't react well after drinking from a toilet bowl laced with cocaine. The misunderstandings in My Boss's Daughter cascade from Kutcher picking up a discarded briefcase and having it open to a gay men's magazine, which of course gives Reid the wrong idea. From there, the gags and characters follow in the same what-were-they-smoking randomness: the coke-addled owl, a girl-next-door type with a bleeding head wound, an elderly neighbor who carries Evander Holyfield's ear in a bag, a blind paraplegic who brags about his erections, and a JFK conspiracy theory centered on Desi Arnaz. Of course, throwaway bits have been Zucker's stock-in-trade in joke-a-second films such as Airplane!, Top Secret, and The Naked Gun, but his sense of timing has evaporated. The only real physical comedy in My Boss's Daughter comes from Zucker, Dorfman, and Kutcher stumbling over each other, but it's unlikely anyone will laugh.