Edward Burns burst onto the scene in 1995 with The Brothers McMullen, a genuine Sundance success story that was shot on a budget of $25,000 with cameras on surreptitious loan, as the story goes, from his day gig at Entertainment Tonight or another one of those syndicated tele-mag shows. He subsequently landed Cameron Diaz, Jennifer Aniston, Heather Graham and Brittany Murphy for other early movies, then segued into acting in studio projects, including Saving Private Ryan and, gulp, Life or Something Like It. Burns’ bread and butter, though, has always remained flitting tales of romantic nervousness and blue collar ennui set amongst beer-swilling Irish Catholics, and so it continues with The Groomsmen, his latest film.

The movie tells the story of a reunited group of lifelong suburban New York pals — Paulie (Burns), older brother Jimbo (Donal Logue), irrepressible cousin Mike (Jay Mohr), family man bar owner Dez (Matthew Lillard) and T.C. (John Leguizamo) — who all gather in advance of Paulie’s impending marriage to his pregnant fiancée, Sue (the aforementioned Murphy). All manner of would-coulda-shoulda secrets, frustrations and resentments are trotted out and dissected, with each character searching for their own sort of settlement.

If blithely tossed about $20 bills are the currency of early John Grisham (and anyone who’s read The Firm knows what I’m talking about), tall cold ones are the narrative crutch of Burns’ oeuvre; there’s never been a substantive male conversation that didn’t revolve around and/or involve beer in his screen world. In The Groomsmen we have to wait all the way until the second scene of the movie, but then, soon enough, characters are swigging whilst picking up one another from the airport, fishing, eating, reminiscing… you get the picture.

A snapshot of thirtysomething reticence, the movie is all very familiar, both in general and when placed up against Burns’ other work. But it’s also decently acted, giving most of its male cast against-type roles to play around with, and Mohr plenty of scenery to chew. Burns further indulges this with longer set-piece takes and wide shots, providing an easy-to-swallow answer for viewers who’ve wondered where The Brothers McMullen’s neo-masculine ambivalence has gone in the past decade. (Bauer Martinez, R, 98 mins.)