Remember
the days when nobody worried about getting an R rating and
just went ahead and made funny movies? Remember when sex comedies
were sex comedies, and chick flicks were chick flicks, and
never the twain should meet? Okay, maybe longing for those
days just makes me old. Or maybe it's just a critic thing.
What
it's not is A Guy Thing.
Director
Chris Koch has thrown together a likeable cast and an amusing
premise. But whether by studio interference or his own desire
for marketability, any bite this movie might have had has
been taken away. Yes, this results in the coveted PG-13, but
we're left with a freshly neutered dog of a movie. It wants
to be playful, but all it can really do is lie around and
think of better times.
Part
of the problem does lie with its awkward melding of genres.
A Guy Thing tries to look at a chick flick situation
through male eyes. To do it, it tries to set up that men have
an unspoken instinctive agreement to protect each other from
getting found out by women. But so as not to turn off the
female audience, the movie also goes to great lengths to prove
that Paul (Jason Lee) is not that kind of guy. Except he is,
and then he isn't. And then maybe, just maybe, he is again.
We meet
Paul at his bachelor party. In just one week, he will marry
Karen (Selma Blair), the perfect woman according to his brother
Peter (Thomas Lennon).
Superguy
Paul doesn't like the ritual of the bachelor party, especially
the part about strippers (in deference to women in the audience,
they're really just bad go-go dancers). To take the attention
off of himself, he trades "groom" hats with best man Jim (Shawn
Hatosy) so that Paul can fade into the background.
Except
that one first-time dancer, Becky (Julia Stiles), notices
him and the next thing you know, he's bought her a drink and
awakened the next morning with her naked in his bed. What
a guy, that Paul. If you've spotted the strange dichotomy
of a guy shunning the cheap sexuality of a bachelor party
only to be the one who "gets some," ignore it. It's a guy
thing.
As it
turns out, though, the two didn't actually do anything, and
a good thing, too, because Becky is Karen's cousin. Such a
close cousin, in fact, that she's at every family gathering
that week in preparation for the wedding, but not close enough
to have ever met before. As for the being in bed naked part,
that's really just a plot complication so that we can have
hijinks surrounding her missing underwear and think
that they had sex. Oops. I've spoiled the surprise.
A slight
subplot pops up with Becky's ex-boyfriend, a psycho cop who
still has an obsession with her, though he may have cheated
on her. It's never quite clear, though Paul makes a reference
to his cheating late in the film, so maybe it will be clarified
on DVD. Lochlyn Munro plays the cop with such jarring scene-chewing
that it makes one long for the subtlety of Gary Busey. Or
even Jake Busey.
Though
grounded in the real world of Seattle, A Guy Thing
wants to have touches of whimsy which would make the ex-boyfriend
seem just part of the overall feel. Paul seems to be easily
swept up into his own imagination. His parents are unexpected
(and thankfully underplayed) horrors, but not really. And
little random moments of lunacy threaten to burst forth from
time to time.
But Koch
doesn't have the touch for it, odd because he has worked on
Malcolm In The Middle. Again, I'll blame editing, which
is pretty ham-handed. Many jokes get set-ups, and then don't
follow through to punchlines. Paul's imagination sequences
are all believable (death for the tone trying to survive here),
getting longer and more mundane each time they happen. They're
supposed to surprise the audience into laughing, but they
just don't work.
At one
point, the script even trots out the old gag of stuffy parents
getting stoned. As old as the joke is, the audience looks
forward to seeing it played out and gets nothing. We see Karen's
parents loosen up a bit, but nothing outrageous.
The worst
consequence occurs completely offscreen, as the minister becomes
too ill to perform the wedding. But that's okay, because that
enables another joke that the audience didn't see coming an
hour before, only if they stepped out for a moment to take
a phone call. At least the truly great stand-up Larry Miller
almost manages to salvage it.
One joke
does work well, and that stems from the film's title. The
first time it's used comes as a surprise punch to an otherwise
ridiculous scene, provoking a huge laugh. But it also sets
up a running gag that the movie forgets to run with. I won't
spoil it here, just in case you do decide to catch this movie
on cable.
And on
cable it might be worth it. Everybody struggles to make this
movie work. Jason Lee really is a comic actor of leading man
quality, but outside of Kevin Smith's films, he hasn't found
the project to prove it. (And to give props to Koch, this
is one of the two non-Smith movies in which Lee doesn't give
a slightly stilted performance -- Almost Famous being
the other.) Stiles looks uncomfortable playing the free spirited
Becky, but she's such an intense actress that she gives it
all she can.
All the
supporting cast (except for Munro) try to be funny and real,
with a standout being James Brolin as Karen's wealthy father.
Married to one of the most notorious liberals in Hollywood
(Barbra Streisand), Brolin makes one amusing ultra-conservative,
a publisher of hunting magazines and good friend of President
Bush.
As a
date film, which is its intent, A Guy Thing will allow
you to sit quietly in the dark for 101 minutes. If that's
your thing, go for it.
