If you’re reading this review, chances are you’re not a virgin. You also probably have better things to do with your time than watch “The 40-Year-Old Virgin.”

Andy (Steve Carell) lives happily in a home filled with action figures and video games, makes gourmet breakfasts, exercises daily, and dresses tidily. He works at an electronics chain store, blissfully unaware of the murky swamp of adult sexuality that surrounds him and obsesses his co-workers: Paul Rudd, Seth Rogen (“Freaks and Geeks”), Romany Malco (“Weeds”), and an under-used and razor-sharp Jane Lynch playing his boss.

One night at an employees-only poker game, he claims a woman’s breasts feel like bags of sand, and his buddies are flabbergasted. Previously they figured he was probably a serial killer, but now the full horror is known: He’s never had sex.

A crusade to deflower Andy begins. His gang of wingmen takes him out to pick up drunk chicks (including a kamikaze DUI head case, played by Leslie Mann, the director’s wife), gives him lessons in acting enigmatic (“Like David Caruso in ‘Jade,’ ” one friend coaches him), and a tutorial on personal grooming, which culminates in a torturous body-waxing session.

The body-waxing is real, incidentally. The hair you see peeling off Mr. Carell’s chest and nipples, the screams of pain, the blood you see beading up through his denuded pores – it’s all real. The scene is such a shockingly horrific stunt (it really belongs on “Fear Factor”) that it doesn’t need any jokes, and you don’t get any. But you do learn that Steve Carell has now replaced Robin Williams as the Hairiest Man in Hollywood.

With his Pinocchio nose, flat head, and big ears, Mr. Carrell resembles nothing so much as the beloved British children’s character Noddy. In the early part of the movie, he plays Andy with such conviction that I found myself rooting for his virginity to remain intact. Eventually he meets a nice girl, a spaced-out hippie mom named Trish (Catherine Keener), and the two hit it off.

At this point, the movie becomes a fairly typical romantic comedy, climaxing with the inevitable misunderstanding and the predictable chase to tell the one you love that you really love them. Director Judd Apatow (who had a hand in the unhinged lunacy of Will Ferrell’s “Anchorman”) is smart enough to hold one of his best jokes in reserve until the final scene, but once the movie decides it’s going to get seriously romantic, it also gets seriously boring.

Mr. Carell initially developed the character of Andy while working at Chicago’s famous improv comedy company, Second City, the comedic crucible in which stars like Bill Murray and Chris Farley were formed. In a world of no-risk Hollywood comedy, the fact that movies have stopped raiding “Saturday Night Live” for franchise characters and started raiding Second City is a step forward.

But like most movies based on “Saturday Night Live” characters (“A Night at the Roxbury,” “Superstar,” “Stuart Saves His Family”), “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” is a series of skits held together only by the presence of Andy in every scene. For about half the running time, Mr. Carell’s committed performance as the title character is more than enough – but it can’t carry the whole film.

Laugh for laugh, “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” isn’t any worse than “Wayne’s World” – although it’s not nearly as good as “The Blues Brothers.” On the other hand, it’s not nearly as bad as “It’s Pat!” – and that’s saying something.