新郎上错床 A Guy Thing review by James Berardinelli 英语影评

新郎上错床 A Guy Thing review by James Berardinelli 英语影评
新郎上错床，A Guy Thing

With A Guy Thing, a dubious achievement has occurred — here we have characters in a romantic comedy who exhibit the kind of mind-boggling stupidity previously reserved for protagonists in Grade Z horror movies. When faced with a minor setback, these characters to exacerbate the situation by acting in the most embarrassing, outrageous, inappropriate manner possible. Why read the instructions on a box of medication for a delicate condition when you can have someone shout them across a crowded store? And what better way to avoid a party than pretending to have a bad case of diarrhea that lasts an entire evening?

 

Sometimes it's easy to forget that actors have bills just like the rest of us. And, for performers like Julia Stiles, Jason Lee, and Selma Blair, who often spend time in front of cameras wielded by indie directors, the average payday may not be spectacular. So they must need money, or exposure, or both. How else is it possible to explain the participation of all three in a motion picture that can be considered nothing short of a travesty? This must have been of those grin-and-bear it deals — the kind that allows an actor to earn enough to replenish a bare cupboard. www.130q.com

 

It strikes me as unspeakably sad that it took four credited screenwriters to come up with this script. What exactly did they all do? What did any of them do? A Guy Thing is easily the worst-written romantic comedy in recent memory. It's not funny, it's not romantic, it stifles the charisma of the participants, and it doesn't feature a single line of intelligent dialogue. This movie is so inept that it can't even elevate itself to the bastion of formulaic mediocrity normally reserved for early year entries into the genre. Those attending this as a "date movie" had better hope their partner possesses a highly forgiving nature.

 

The movie makes a little more sense if you start with the premise that all of the characters have been lobotomized. That explains their inability to see obvious deceptions and behave rationally. Consider this situation: you're trapped in an upstairs bathroom with a fake case of the runs. You have to get out of the house without being seen by your fianc?s cousin, with whom you think you had a drunken one-night stand She is in the dining room, eating dinner with the rest of the family. Do you (a) sneak down the stairs and quietly exit through the door, or (b) squeeze through the bathroom window and climb down a conveniently placed tree? No points for guessing what the character in A Guy Thing does. Sit-com characters act more believably.

 

Paul (Jason Lee) is engaged to marry Karen (Selma Blair), who is the perfect woman. She comes complete with a nice wardrobe, a rich daddy, and a nutty aunt. But there's a hitch — on the night of his bachelor party, Paul believes that, in a drunken stupor, he had with a beautiful, vivacious young woman named Becky (Julia Stiles). He later learns that — Holy Coincidence, Batman! — Becky happens to be Karen's cousin. Even worse, Becky has a psycho cop ex-boyfriend who doesn't understand the term "anger management." Now, Paul has a case of the crabs (gotten from whom?) and is scared witless that Karen's father (James Brolin) will find out about his faithlessness. And, after taking a short ride down a long hill, he's beginning to wonder whether Becky might be a better choice for a life mate than Karen.

 

It takes a truly awful motion picture to nullify the considerable appeal of Lee, Stiles, and Blair, but A Guy Thing has what it takes. These three have enough talent to rebound from a debacle like this, although it's questionable whether the same can be said of director Chris Koch. If ever a romantic comedy is going to fail at the box office, this is it. The movie isn't a guy's thing, a girl's thing, or anybody else's thing.

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