One Night at McCool’s

It is a little hard to know what to make of “One Night at McCool’s.” Where on earth did this picture come from? Too poorly written to be funny, too scatterbrained to develop any style, and too badly acted to serve as a star vehicle, it grinds along grimly, dragging our spirits down with it. If ever there were a picture that cried out to be sent straight to video, or perhaps never even released, this is the one. The studio bosses (not to mention the actors) should have taken one look at it and realized that the whole thing had been a terrible mistake. But no, they went ahead with a major marketing campaign, proving once again that the size of the marketing budget does not necessarily correlate with quality of the picture. Indeed, it has been suggested that there is an inverse relationship. “One Night at McCool’s” centers around Jewel (Tyler), a sex goddess with a knack for reducing all of the men she meets to gibbering fools. In the course of the picture she meets and drives crazy the following men: Randy (Dillon), an underachieving bartender at the bar that gives the picture its title; Carl (Reiser), an arrogant Yuppie lawyer and Randy’s cousin; and Dehling (Goodman), a mournful detective investigating the murder of Jewels’ previous boyfriend.

Jewel manages to manipulate these men just so, all apparently with the intention of acquiring a nice home and dining room set. Tyler tarts it up as the sociopathic femme fatale with an unnatural fascination with DVD players. In her career so far she has yet to prove she can act, but in this movie she does, I suppose, what she was hired to do, which is vamp about in a series of revealing outfits and exude sensuality. Or something like that. It is odd that such a picture sports this relatively heavyweight cast, which includes Michael Douglas as a bingo playing, oddly coiffed hit man, hired by Randy to wax Jewel for all the misery she has caused him. (Gee, is this a romance or what?) Douglas showing up here after his lauded performance in “Traffic” is a bit like George W. Bush deciding that he would like to leave the White House and serve on a school board in Texas. I am surprised that the cast did not physically seize every copy of the picture and destroy them. Nobody’s career is coming out of this with any gloss, including that of the director, Harald Zwart, who displays no noticeable talent as he throttles the material in an increasingly desperate attempt to wring some humor out of it. Usually, even in a weak picture, you can find a bright spot, some nice scenery, a good action scene, often an actor in a small role who steals scene after scene. But “One Night at McCool’s” gives us nothing. Stan Seidel’s script makes a half-hearted attempt at a Rashomon -like telling of the story from three different perspectives, but the effect is more depressing than energizing. “One Night at McCool’s” obviously wants to be edgy and outrageous, but it winds up leaden and conventional, all the heavy breathing notwithstanding. (5/2/2001)