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Total Bust
'One Night at McCool's' is big on jiggle but lean on everything else
By Richard von Busack
LIV TYLER'S BREASTS--are they big enough to warrant an entire movie? Unfortunately, this question is all that's raised by One Night at McCool's, an unfunny, unthrilling comedy thriller about a bad-girl grifter named Jewel (Tyler) who juggles a number of male patsies. These include unemployed bartender Matt Dillon, cop John Goodman, lawyer Paul Reiser and hitman Michael Douglas. To go down the roster: this is Dillon's kind of comedy; he stole There's Something About Mary from Cameron Diaz, but he's never much of a presence here. The movie lets us know he's poor and lazy and sloppy and it disapproves of him throughly (nothing as obvious as a slob comedy made by people who dislike poor folk--who are, of course, the key audience for such gusty stuff).
Goodman should play more cops, maybe even Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op, but he's miscast as an arch-Catholic, sin-fearing cop; one look at Goodman and you can tell he's not adverse to the sins of the flesh. As for Reiser--we see him topless instead of Tyler, so the movie's a cheat and if Rosie O' Donnell couldn't get a laugh out of being trussed up in leather S & M gear in Exit to Eden, how is Reiser going to do it?
Douglas is amusingly coiffured in a Kirk Douglas pompadour. Still, as the producer of this film--a first offering from his Furthur productions--he's a bit demure to cash into the post-Farrelly Brothers wave of crass comedy. And One Night at McCool's has the same mysogynist qualities as most of Douglas' starring vehicles; it's a slapstick reprise of the girl-hating in Fatal Attraction. As for Tyler, she tries hard--even re-creating (badly) the car wash sequence from Cool Hand Luke--but she can't muster the innocence to make her scamming look believable. Tyler's hard, blank availability doesn't entice you--and she can barely act her way across a room. She flaunts what she has, but this movie can't survive on her jiggle alone.
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