“L.A. Story” most certainly has some very funny moments but it is one of the most bizarre films I’ve encountered and I never really seemed to fit together; it’s pieces from different jigsaws and that’s a real shame because some of the humour here is fantastic.

In “L.A. Story”, Steve Martin (“Planes, Trains & Automobiles”, “The Pink Panther”) stars as a whacky weatherman named Harris, who is contacted by a talking billboard that wants to help him win the affections of a British journalist named Sara (Victoria Tennant). As the film goes on it just gets stranger, it’s sort of like “Groundhog Day” but really messy.

Steve Martin is really funny here but like Eddie Murphy (“Beverly Hills Cop”), he has a tendency to pop up in bad films. While this one isn’t bad as such it isn’t good either. Martin tries really hard here and does provide us with lots of funny moments but it’s too bad the in-between the chuckles there is utter confusion. The other characters were fairly boring, making the film seem very mediocre at times, and even the cameos by Patrick Stewart (“Star Trek: Nemesis”) and Chevy Chase (“Fletch”) don’t really add all that much.

“L.A. Story” feels at times like a satire of L.A. or at least what’ll be like in years to come as we get a hilarious scene where Harris partakes in a shootout on the streets of L.A. because it’s “Open season on the Los Angeles Freeway” according to the Harris character, other times it feels like a fantasy film with the talking billboard and it also feels like a sappy romantic comedy and seen in the rest of the film. The film is several different articles from several different newspapers glued together in the scruffiest manner and that’s a real shame because one of those articles is great but some of it is covered up.