Like the Costco warehouse where this flop was filmed, “Employee of the Month” is economy-sized. It’s the movie version of the so-cheap-you-had-to-buy-it 25-lb pimento loaf. Instead of being dotted

with tables of sample-sized treats to break up the experience of wandering through a store the size of Delaware, though, you get the occasional plot point cribbed from a mustard-encrusted kid’s menu maze

in a bad buffet restaurant. Sure, it’s only 103 minutes long, but it feels like 103 minutes at the end of a stand-still membership store line waiting on a price check for the 85-decibel Fisher Price My First

Car Alarm some kid’s already wearing out the batteries to at the cashier.

“Employee of the Month” tackles such questions of our time as “They let the guy who wrote ‘Sorority Boys’ direct?” There’s scrappy gotta-be-me Zack the SuperClub box boy (Dane Cook), who falls for the new Barbie doll checker (Jessica Simpson) and decides to lure her into his race-car bed by displacing career toady Vince as top dog.

It’s hard for a movie with such flat ambitions to fall short of the mark, but this thing makes Jessica Simpson’s part in “The Dukes of Hazzard” look like Jodie Foster’s performance in “Nell.” Apart from

Simpson’s yawning crevasse of cleavage, her role would have better been played by a thousand-pack box of generic non-dairy-creamer packets. The rest of the characters draw from the same nearly dry

kiddy pool of inspiration: the dumb and possibly gay supervisor, the dumb guy with thick glasses, the dumb Indian, the dumb Mexican, the dumb and fat security guard, the dumb and fat human resources girl, the senile grandma who says dirty things.

Dane Cook calling himself a comedian is like the stretch-marked girl pole-dancing to Whitesnake a ballerina. There’s more laughs in “Employee of the Month“‘s brief montage of random SuperClub shoppers picking up humorously large packages of items, like a bucket-sized container of hair gel, than there is in Cook’s entire repertoire. (His most quoted comedy bits include a routine where he describes

someone cutting in front of him in traffic, to which he responds with “Um, hello” and a routine where he talks about how annoying it is when people use your driveway to turn around.) Sure, it’s dishonest to call himself a comedian, but I can see how he would feel weird about listing his current occupation as “tool.”

If you’re tingling with suspense as to how “Employee of the Month” ends, you’re probably in its target audience — I’ll wrap it up so you can get back to chewing your gum. This would be the same target

audience that considers it a spoiler to explain that assistant manager is a rank lower than manager in the SuperClub world, the same target audience that thinks the line “like a singed koala looking for an

all-night burn center” is a zinger, and that saying the word “serendipitous” qualifies as a joke because, like, who TALKS like that? Seeing this stuff actually get made into a movie, a movie that presumably took money and hours of many people’s professional lives to get made, is like watching the unwashed, undershirt-wearing defendant on Judge Judy attempt to wield legalese to explain why he racked up a

$3,000 bill on his ex-girlfriend’s cell phone prank calling the guy who fired him from the Dollar Store. “Employee of the Month” is the bargain basement version of “Office Space,” if you cut out all the

brilliant satire, deep truths, likable protagonists, loathsome antagonists, quotable lines, and replaced the red Swingline stapler with Dane Cook’s stupid pair of Heelys. The best part of the movie is when Cook chucks a tennis ball at the head of a mouthy kid lost in the store, knocking the kid out. Unfortunately, the audience gets no such mercy.

Ashley O’Dell reviews movies that aren’t in the theater anymore.