SHE'S THE ONE
A film review by Gerald Tan
Copyright 1996 The Flying Inkpot
Directed by: Edward Burns Written by: Edward Burns Cast: Jennifer Aniston (Renee), Maxine Bahns (Hope), Edward Burns (Mickey Fitzpatrick), Cameron Diaz (Heather Davis), John Mahoney (Mr Fitzpatrick), Mike McGlone (Francis Fitzpatrick) Produced by: Fox Searchlight Pictures Music: Tom Petty Running Time: 96 minutes Rating: ** out *****
MEN BEHAVING LIKE NINNIES
A romantic comedy about Irish Catholic brothers living in New York with skewed life philosophies, screwing up their relationships with women. With a $25,000 budget and a bunch of unknown actors, Edward Burns wrote, directed and starred in this movie last year and called it THE BROTHERS MCMULLEN. This year, with a $3 million budget and some big name stars, he's done the same story and called it SHE'S THE ONE. The first movie was a little home-made masterpiece that charmed with its fault-ridden but likeable characters, cynically witty but not smart-ass script, and fine acting all around. SHE'S THE ONE, on the other hand, is just a waste of good Tom Petty music. As Irish Catholic brothers who've screwed up their love lives must be wont to say, "What the hell went wrong?"
Ostensibly, the story is about the brothers Fitzpatrick, their women, and their gruff but well-meaning father. Mickey (Burns) is the karmically damaged elder brother who after discovering his former fiance Heather (Cameron Diaz) in bed with another man, gives up on life and becomes a taxi cab driver, to the disgust of his brother Francis (Mike McGlone).
Francis is a successful but discontented Wall Street executive who is neurotically competitive about everything and doesn't want to have sex with his wife (Jennifer Aniston) because he rationalizes that it would be like cheating on his mistress, who happens to be his brother's ex-fiance Heather. And as if things weren't bad enough for them, they also have to cope with their father (John Mahoney, FRASIER's dad on TV), a veritable font of bad advice and confused logic, and Hope (Maxine Bahns - Burns' girlfriend in THE BROTHERS MCMULLEN, Burns' girlfriend in real life), Mickey's new girlfriend, a suspiciously romantic waif who marries him the day after she meets him, while neglecting to tell him that she intends to leave for Paris in a few weeks.
Emotional chaos erupts when Mickey finds out about Francis's affair with Heather, gets mad with him, has second thoughts about his marriage to Hope, who gets mad at Mickey for getting mad at Francis, Francis asks Renee for a divorce and proposes to Heather. Everybody pretty much gets on each other's nerves and they will get on yours too, with their self-absorbed whingeing.
The plot loses both cohesion and momentum about midways through the show, and if you start losing interest, you might end up hanging on to the running series of peurile jokes revolving around Francis's preoccupation with his sexual abilities. But even on this you'll find yourself shortchanged because the people on the Board of Film Censorship have really butchered this one, as according to their own nefarious and unknowable tenets (the film has a PG-13 rating in America).
If SHE'S THE ONE, like THE BROTHERS MCMULLEN before it is meant to tell us anything, it is that men, given any event in life more complicated than drinking beer, fishing with dad, and smoking cigars, will invariably and without exception act like morons, but forgive them anyway because they don't know any better.
But while THE BROTHERS MCMULLEN worked because the characters were believably hung up, and the humour was situational rather than gag-oriented, SHE'S THE ONE rings hollowly to the very end. It's mix of cheap cariactures, smug jokes, smarmy romance and unlikely coincidences is grating more than anything else. The final scene, one of the Fitzpatrick's ritual fishing trips, where Daddy Fitzpatrick lifts the "no women onboard" rule on his boat to get Mickey and Hope to make up so that we can have a happy ending is wincingly twee but thankfully brief.
And for those of you who want to watch this show because of "Friends" star Jennifer Aniston's "debut" performance, you might like to know that she was previously in a movie called THE LEPRECHAUN, which was good enough to be a reference in WAYNE'S WORLD II.
The Flying Inkpot Rating System: * Wait for the TV2 broadcast. ** A little creaky, but still better than staying at home with Gotcha! *** Pretty good, bring a friend. **** Amazing, potent stuff. ***** Perfection. See it twice.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews