Tomcats

Bomb Rating: 

This damn thing might as well have starred Rosie O'Donnell and Roseanne for all the nudity it had in it.

Let me describe what I was doing with my gum during this film. I would chomp down on it a couple of times, then I would let it sit there on the tip of my extended tongue. Within seconds, I became acutely aware of the weight of this gum and realized that I had lost the willpower to chew it. Presumably, the synapses in my brain were no longer firing, no longer sending that signal to my jaw to bite down or instructing my tongue to pull the gum back into my mouth. So it just sat there. I too, just sat there. "Tomcats," meanwhile, played on.

The sort of pain involved in watching "Tomcats" is the kind of pain normally associated with having one's inner eyelids attacked by a swarm of killer bees. The entire story is based on an idea that doesn't even make sense: A group of friends make a huge bet about who'll be the last to get married. The winner gets a pot of money they've put together. Seven years later, the pot has grown to half a million dollars and only Michael Delaney (Jerry O'Connell) and Kyle Brenner (Jake Busey) are standing. Michael gets into trouble at a casino, racks up $50,000 in debt, and plans to get Kyle married so that he can win the pot and pay off his debt before the evil casino owner (Bill Maher) kills him.

Did writer/director Gregory Poirier make this up as he went along or did he just start each morning by injecting crack directly into his brain? Given that his 2001 writing credits also include "See Spot Run," one can only assume that the answer is "both." Where is this guy's common sense? First of all, what friends wouldn't just divide up a pot like that five or six ways? What friends wouldn't agree to let their buddy, who's going to lose his life over $50,000, borrow the money from the pot? What kind of idiotic writer doesn't make Michael's debt at least $500,000 to make this seem like some sort of actual problem? The only good part about the film is that David Ogden Stiers eats a testicle.

To make matters worse, this film is so unbelievably misogynistic it's disgusting. Women are depicted as morons, idiots and whores. So where the hell are the tits? Shannon Elizabeth, Jaime Pressly, and tons of hot-looking totties and not one naked breast? Just what the hell kind of R-rated film is that? This damn thing might as well have starred Rosie O'Donnell and Roseanne for all the nudity it had in it. Once this revelation makes the rounds, "Tomcats" may well achieve the steepest dropoff in attendance since the XFL.

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