Nobody died, nothing blew up and no one got naked. The new movie “Wonder Boys” ranks as an average performance on the excitement scale.Michael Douglas plays a disgruntled pot-smoking professor, Grady Tripp, whose life becomes chaotic in a weekend of black comedy.Never venturing far from his hot pink woman’s bath robe and his Sally Jessie Raphael glasses, Grady is an irritable middle-aged man who refuses to make decisions, particularly about women and his unfinished book.He has just been left by his third wife, has impregnated the university chancellor, is considering sleeping with one of his students and refuses to finish his 2,612 page, single-spaced book that his gay editor has been waiting on for seven years to publish.Fear of making the wrong decision and not living up to the standards of his last book, a critically acclaimed novel that made him famous, controls the completion of the book. Writers’ block is not an option for him, so he continues to add to it, including everything from dental records to past tax history of his characters.A lot happens in the movie, but it lacked excitement. It is an average film. As much as Hollywood exploits sex, infidelity, killing and murder, without them, a movie must stand on its own. This movie did not have a good or interesting enough plot to stand alone.Despite the movie’s lack of plot, it has a great cast. Douglas drops the overbearing, arrogant, out-of-control, macho man role for which he is known, in exchange for a confused, wandering, semi-sensitive man stuck in a rut.Robert Downey Jr. plays Grady’s homosexual editor, who has clung onto his job with the promise of Grady’s next novel. His unstable career pushes him to experiment with a transvestite he meets on the plane into town and eventually with one of Grady’s suicidal students, James.James, played by Frances McDormand, is a student that cannot separate the truth from fiction. He looks to Grady for guidance, however, the only help Grady can give is getting him to relax by getting him drunk and high; beyond that, Grady is as confused as James.Grady’s student Hannah, played by Katie Holmes, tries to seduce him. She almost succeeds until she points out every flaw that Grady has refused to admit to himself.All of the actors do a good job portraying the mediocre screenplay.”Wonder Boys” will be in theaters Friday.