“I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell” turns a clever, witty book into a confused, condescending film that offers nothing but recycled, crude humor — lacking both sense of self and originality.

The book, “I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell,” was released in 2006 and slowly became a huge hit among college students, eventually making its way to the top of the New York Times best-seller list.

Compiled of vignettes, the book is written from the first-person point of view of Tucker Max, as he drinks his way through Duke University School of Law, sleeping with as many girls as he can, while making fun of everyone around him and often embarrassing himself and his friends in the process.

The cinematic adaptation of “I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell,” directed by Bob Gosse and made on a $7 million budget provided by the independent production company Darko Entertainment, follows a format very similar to this past summer’s breakout hit, “The Hangover.” A group of guys (Tucker, Drew and Dan) go out and have an extraordinary night, doing outlandish things and making outrageous memories with each other and those around them.

But while “The Hangover” is witty, smart and innovative, “I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell” is stale and inauthentic. This does not mean that it’s a terrible movie; it was just made at the wrong time and suffered from too much pressure to live up to its much funnier literary predecessor.

Max — a suave, morally corrupt 20-something — has one person on his mind: himself. Matt Czuchry of “Gilmore Girls” fame, in the role of Tucker Max, just didn’t come off quite right.

Besides the fact that his character is barely introduced and experiences almost no development throughout the movie, Czuchry’s portrayal of Max comes off too slick and insincere. Sure, the character is supposed to be slick and insincere, but the performance did not make any of it seem natural. Doing the squinty-eye, ear-to-ear grin every time arrogance is supposed to be portrayed gets old fast.

Drew (Jesse Bradford), Max’s morose, verbally aggressive friend, is portrayed even worse. Bradford seems to almost be acting out a caricature of the original character, and much like Czuchry, he goes for the cheap facial expressions, giving a show-not-tell performance that just gets annoying.

That is, until he finds a stripper, who quickly becomes his girlfriend and can go tit for his tat in the verbal boxing ring. He then becomes dull, almost completely leaving behind the mean spirit and the essence that makes the character original.

The so-called “funny” moments in this film, though completely original and refreshing in the book, seemed like a cut-and-paste of scenes from every other obscene contemporary comedy, completely stripping itself of the unconventional identity the book maintained. The first scene does achieve the goal of portraying shocking, original material, but that’s about where it stops, promising something the rest of the film does not deliver.

Then there’s the fact that toward the end of the movie, morality tries to weasel its way into the plot. What makes the funny moments humorous is that Tucker and company couldn’t care less about feelings getting hurt or abiding to the ethical code of society.

The 180-degree shift at the end is both confusing and unnecessary.

Without it, the movie would have undoubtedly been better.

How the screenplay would have taken form as a plot-driven story without it, I don’t know, but it just didn’t belong.

The movie isn’t the worst thing ever made. If you see it, you will laugh — probably more than once.

It’s just sad to see a book that derived its comedic moments from honesty and originality get adapted into a picture that is the cinematic equivalent of a fly-over state.

Reach the reporter at pmelbour@asu.edu.