MiddletownJournal.com

Grade: C+

Verdict: An uneasy mix of dark comedy, film noir and cheesecake.

Details: Starring Matt Dillon, Michael Douglas and Liv Tyler. Directed by Harald Zwart. Rated R for violence, sexuality and profanity. One hour, 33 minutes.

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Review: “One Night at McCool's” shows us three different men falling for a woman who expertly, shamelessly bends them to her will. It's a black comedy trying to be an updated homage to film noir's femmes fatales. But let's be honest: It's really all about watching Liv Tyler wash a car with her breasts.

Steady, fellas, I'll come back to that.

Tyler plays Jewel, an on-the-make young woman who goes through skintight, barely there dresses almost as quickly as she goes through men. We hear about her first from Randy (Matt Dillon), bartender at McCool's, who rescues Jewel late one night from a thug (Andrew Silverstein, aka Andrew Dice Clay). Jewel gets Randy in bed, and under her thumb, immediately, moving into his rundown house and involving him in some dangerous business.

Randy tells his story to sleazy hit man Burmeister, played by Michael Douglas, who also produced the film, wearing a terrifically awful pompadour. This confessional motif is repeated by Randy's yuppie attorney cousin Carl (Paul Reiser), who tells his own version of his affair with Jewel to a therapist (Reba McEntire), and a homicide detective (John Goodman), who spills his obsession for the woman to his priest (Richard Jenkins).

Shot by video director Harald Zwart in his feature debut, “Night” has some initial, “Roshomon”-style fun as it plays and replays some of the same scenes with a change in emphasis or characterization. But the late screenwriter Stan Seidel uses this gimmick as an excuse not to bother giving Jewel a genuine identity; there's no there there.

While there's something appealing in the comeuppance factor of three horndogs whose Playboy Channel fantasy bites them on the butt, this is more a case of having your cheesecake and eating it, too. This is just another, curvier variation on recent (actually worse) she-devil movies like “Saving Silverman” and “Love Stinks.”

Tyler is certainly game. She throws herself (literally) into that sudsy car-washing scene with a gusto that blurs the line between sexual objectification and sexual power. But then she speaks in that baby-doll voice. And you realize she's in over her head.

The movie might have had more bite if she and director Zwart had channeled their energy into coming up with some sliver of psychological realism for Jewel. Without that tiny bit of human believability, the movie quickly becomes a plot machine that ends, predictably, with a big, loud shootout that owes a fatigued debt to Quentin Tarantino.

The movie's secondhand feeling wouldn't matter so much if the jokes were better. But come on, the folks who made “Night” actually thought it was a good idea to give Andrew Dice Clay two roles, doubling his chances to chew scenery and stop the flick cold.

“One Night at McCool's” foreshadows “About Adam,” an Irish comedy slated to open next month. But in that film, the amoral blank slate who accommodates the other characters' sexual fantasies is a guy named Adam (Stuart Townsend).

Unlike Tyler's Jewel, Adam is really only trying to make everyone happy. The movie's blithe amorality seems both more sophisticated and more wicked than anything found in “Night's” labored plotting, which includes a couple of murders that are intended to seem amusing but definitely aren't.

“McCool's” isn't terrible, just a little tiresome. It's like getting dragged to a strip club by some pals who decide to jump onstage and perform for amateur night; you watch with an embarrassed, encouraging smile, wishing they were just a little bit better . . . or a whole lot worse.

— Steve Murray, Cox News Service