A Good Night Time

One Night at McCool's Dir: Harald Zwart Starring: Liv Tyler Matt Dillon Paul Reiser John Goodman Michael Douglas 2001 R, 93  m RATING: 6 out of 10

PULP DICTION: Liv Tyler stars as a femme-fatale in a fairly amusing yet uneven comedy.

The enormous influence of Pulp Fiction's staggered, broken, complex structure continues to show up in countless crime films, most of them using it as a crutch to compensate for weak story and characters.  One Night at McCool's is a comedy that makes good use of a non-linear story structure, yet it too rests all its weight on it.  It's sad, too, since much more fun could have been derived from its quirky characters. One Night at McCool's story revolves around Liv Tyler, who enchants three men she meets after a night at the bar of the title. There's Matt Dillon who stars as a lonely guy in need of a motherly type of girlfriend,Paul Reiser as a self-proclaimed gift to women, and John Goodman, as a widowed, religious cop looking for a new wife.  The story is structured around their retelling of their encounters with Tyler, who is of course, incapable of doing wrong in their eyes.  It's funny to see each character project their own twisted view on what went on, and then see another character retell the same scene in a completely different way. What isn't funny, however, is to see the film desperately trying to interweave these points of view while forgetting about characters and dialogue.  While the characters are all easy to laugh at,  there really isn't a main character to keep narrative focused, since they all commit a deplorable act that makes the stories they are recounting all questionable. True, it's fun not to know who's giving the closest rendition of the truth, but to have not one redeemable character makes it hard to care about what happens to them. Paul Reiser gets the most laughs out of any of the other main actors, but it's Michael Douglas' small role as a retro, overgrown-hair, bingo-playing hitman, chewing up scenery and that generates the most laughs and steals every scene.  Had One Night at McCool's focused on its characters more than attempting to seem clever with its plot device, it would have been side-splitting rather than simply amusing.

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