The twist this time: The guys all agree to pay into a mutual fund. The last one still single collects all the money. The fund quickly grows to nearly $500,000, so their fund must have bought hot tech stocks. (In the sequel, those same stocks—oh, never mind.)
The guy who vows never to marry is Kyle (Jake Busey). He likes to take his dates golfing and run over them with the cart. They bounce right up and keep smiling. The guy who wants to collect the money is Michael (Jerry O’Connell). He comes into a valuable piece of information: Kyle met one perfect woman, cruelly dumped her, and has always wondered if he made a mistake. Michael tracks down the woman, who is Natalie (Shannon Elizabeth) and enlists her in his scheme. She’ll seduce and marry Kyle and get her revenge—oh, and she wants half the money, too.
The complication, which is so obvious it nearly precedes the setup, is that Michael and Natalie fall for each other. This despite the fact that by going along with his plan she reveals herself as a shameless vixen. The movie then runs through an assembly line of routine situations, including bad jokes about S&M and a proctologist who suspects his wife is a lesbian, before arriving at a sequence of astonishing bad taste.
Read no further if through reckless wrongheadedness you plan to see this movie. What happens is that Kyle develops testicular cancer and has to have surgery to remove one of his testicle teammates. During recovery he develops a nostalgia for the missing sphere, and sends Michael on a mission to the hospital’s Medical Waste Storage room to steal back the treasure.
Alas, through a series of mishaps, it bounces around the hospital like the quarry in a handball game before ending up on the cafeteria plate of the surgeon who has just removed it, and now eats it, with relish. The surgeon is played by that accomplished actor David Ogden Stiers, my high school classmate, who also does Shakespeare and probably finds it easier.
The movie has other distasteful scenes, including a bachelor party where the star performer starts with ping-pong balls and works up to footballs. If the details are gross, the movie’s overall tone is even more offensive. All sex comedies have scenes in which characters are embarrassed, but I can’t remember one in which women are so consistently and venomously humiliated, as if they were some kind of hateful plague. The guys in the movie don’t even seem to enjoy sex, except as a way of keeping score.
Tomcats was written and directed by Gregory Poirier, who also wrote See Spot Run and thus pulls off the neat trick, within one month, of placing two titles on my list of the worst movies of the year. There is a bright spot. He used up all his doggy-do-do ideas in the first picture.
Turn It Up
(DIRECTED BY ROBERT ADETUYI; STARRING PRAS MICHEL, JA RULE; 2000)
Turn It Up tells the story of a moral weakling who compromises his way through bloodbaths and drug deals while whining about his values. It’s one of those movies where the more the characters demand respect, the less they deserve it. What’s pathetic is that the movie halfway wants its hero to serve as a role model, but neither the hero nor the movie is prepared to walk the walk.
The rap singer Pras, of the Fugees, stars as Diamond, who dreams of becoming a superstar and spends hours in the studio, fine-tuning his tracks with small help from his cokehead mixer. Diamond’s best friend is Gage (the rap singer Ja Rule), who finances the studio time by working as a runner for the drug dealer Mr. B (Jason Stratham). Diamond helps on deliveries, including one in the opening scene that leads to a shootout with a Chinese gang.
Dead bodies litter the screen, but there is not one word in the rest of the movie about whether Diamond and Gage are wanted by the police for questioning in the matter of perhaps a dozen deaths. By the end of the film, the two of them have killed, oh, I dunno, maybe six or eight other guys, but when we see the words “One Year Later” onscreen at the end, it is not to show Pras in prison but simply to share some sad nostalgia with him.
The movie is very seriously confused in its objectives, as if two or three story approaches are fighting for time on the same screen. Gage is an uncomplicated character—a sniveling weakling with a big gun who murders in cold blood. Diamond is more of a puzzle. He is loyal to Gage, and yet demurs at some of his buddy’s activities (“She’s pregnant,” he protests, when Gage wants to kill a cleaning woman who witnessed one of their massacres). He seems to accept Gage’s lowlife atrocities as the price of getting his studio time paid for and not having to actually work for a living.
The stuff involving Gage, Mr. B, and the significantly named music executive Mr. White (John Ralston) is standard drug-rap-ghetto-crime thriller material. But when Diamond’s mother dies and his homeless, long-missing father (Vondie Curtis-Hall) turns up, another movie tries to get started. The father explains he abandoned his wife and son because he put his music first, and that was the start of his downfall. Now he sees his son doing the same thing. What he doesn’t know is that Diamond has a pregnant girlfriend (Tamala Jones), and won’t even give her his cell phone number because that’s the first step on the long slide to enslavement by a woman.
Diamond’s father listens to his demo tracks and abruptly drops a loud and clear message of music criticism into the movie: “Your music is too processed. You grew up on digitized music—you think that keyboard sample sounds like a real piano.” Then his dad takes him to the American Conservatory of Music and plays classical music for him on a grand piano that apparently stands ready in a large empty space for the convenience of such visitors, and later tries to talk Diamond out of going along with Gage on a dangerous drug run.
Well, Diamond doesn’t much want to go anyway. He keeps talking about how Gage should chill, and how he wants to get out of the drug and gun lifestyle, and how he loves his woman and wants to be a father to his unborn child, but he never really makes any of those hard decisions. It never occurs to him that he is living off of Gage’s drug-soaked earnings—that his studio sessions are paid for by the exploitation of the very people he thinks his songs are about. He can’t act on his qualms, I guess, because the movie needs him for the action scenes. Turn It Up says one thing and does another; Diamond frets and whines, while the movie lays on gunfire, torture, and bloodshed (the scene where Mr. B offers to run Gage’s face through a meat slicer is memorable).
My guess is that Vondie Curtis-Hall had substantial input on his scenes, which have a different tone and sounder values than the rest of the movie. His advice to his son is good, and his performance is the best thing in the movie. But Turn It Up doesn’t deserve it. Here is a film that goes out of its way to portray all the bad guys as white or Chinese, and doesn’t have the nerve to point out that the heroes’ worst enemies are themselves.
The Tuxedo
(DIRECTED BY KEVIN DONOVAN; STARRING JACKIE CHAN, JENNIFER LOVE HEWITT; 2002)
There is an ancient tradition in action movies that the first scene is a self-contained shocker with no relevance to the rest of the plot. James Bond parachutes from a mountainside, Clint Eastwood disarms a robber, etc. Jackie Chan’s The Tuxedo opens with a deer urinating in a mountain stream. The deer, the urine, and the stream have nothing to do with the rest of the film.
The movie’s plot does involve water. The bad guy wants to add an ingredient to the world’s water supply that will cause victims to dehydrate and die. To save themselves, they will have to buy the villain’s pure water. Since his opening gambit is to sabotage, I repeat, the world’s water supply, he will dehydrate everyone except those already drinking only bottled water, and so will inherit a planet of health nuts, which is just as well, since all the fish and animals and birds will dehydrate too, and everyone will have to live on PowerBars.