You can gauge the implausibility of a movie by the number of angels required to fix the plot. Wings of Desire is an exception--a movie with Bruno Ganz and Peter Falk as angels has no credibility problems. But for most movies, having more than one supernatural agent of change is asking for trouble. It's a Wonderful Life needs only one; Angels in the Outfield needs a whole outfield. It's a bad sign, then, when A Life Less Ordinary opens with an entire office building full of seraphim.

In this curio, a baffling mix of romantic fantasy, hyperbolic melodrama, and screwball comedy, a heavenly precinct commander (Dan Hedaya) dispatches two agents to earth to bring together two destined lovers: Robert (Ewan McGregor), a daydreaming janitor in a vast corporation, and Celine (Cameron Diaz), the jaded daughter of the corporation's owner (Ian Holm). When Robert loses his job, he unexpectedly retaliates by kidnapping Celine. The father seeks revenge; the two angels (Holly Hunter and Delroy Lindo) pose as bounty hunters and accept his assignment to track down the future lovebirds.

But ya know, if the angels have all that heavenly omniscience, why do they need to be hired at all? Why do their schemes even backfire, when they can anticipate exactly where the lovebirds are headed and how they'll respond? And if angels are spirits, can they be killed or not? These questions should be answered long before you add your first angel to the mix, even if you're making a madcap farce--especially if you're making a madcap farce, which depends on strict rules of character, behavior, and incident. But the angels--like the mad dentist, the cabin with the survivalist neighbors, the bank robbery, and the big karaoke dance number--are just whimsical indulgences that mirror something from the filmmakers' moviegoing past. Once Hunter and Lindo start toting machine guns and rigging attempted murders, you realize director Danny Boyle and screenwriter John Hodge will have to employ every celestial host in that building to patch their scrapheap of a plot.