Terrible movie, but the couple has potential

Rating: 1/10 (18 March 2011)

Oy.
This movie left us wishing we had Just Gone to see something else. We can't decide which was more painful - sitting through it or having to relive it again by writing about it.
Twenty years ago Danny Maccabee was a sad-sack cardiologist-in-training with a giant honker. Upon overhearing that his bride-to-be has no intention of being faithful to him, he skips out on his wedding and heads to the local bar where a random hottie takes pity on him and inexplicably takes him home for the night. Discovering that a wedding ring, a tale of woe and a nose job are all he needs to get laid, Danny spends the next 20 years seducing barely legal women with tales of the brutality that his imaginary wife inflicts on him. When he's not out inflating his ego in bars he's over-inflating bosoms at his plastic surgery practice in LA. His office manager Katherine, a smart, dependable, single mom, is the one true friend that he seems to have.
And then one night he meets Palmer, a 26-year-old blondeshell that - amazingly - has a body AND brains! She's not just some dime-a-dozen LA actress - she's a school teacher, a shaper of young minds. Somehow it takes just one night of sex on the beach for Danny and Palmer to believe that they are a perfect match for each other.
Alas - true love is not without its pitfalls. When Palmer discovers Danny's fake wedding ring she furiously assumes he's married. Rather than horrify her with tales of his faux-play, Danny tells her he's married but already in the process of getting a divorce. Somewhat lulled by this first lie, Palmer insists that she meet the wife. Panicked at the thought of being caught out Danny somehow convinces Katherine to portray his future ex for what should be a one-time-only meeting, but an unexpected phone call from Katherine's daughter leads Palmer to believe that Danny is a father as well as a husband. The rest of the lies unfurl like a line of dominoes from there: His ex-wife's name is Devlin. His daughter went to boarding school in the UK. Devlin has a German lover named Dolph Lundgren. And somehow all of these lies culminate in the entire group - Danny, Devlin, Palmer, Dolph and the kids - heading to Hawaii together. And at some point during all this chaos Danny realizes that it's Katherine he loves, not Palmer.
We know our job here is to rate the couple and we promise we'll get to them in a minute. But first we need to vent a bit more at the complete implausibility of this entire plot line. We know it's the movies and we're always willing to suspend a little disbelief. But the amount of disbelief here went way beyond the load limit of our suspension cables. One more thing and they'd have snapped. The list of predicaments these characters found themselves in were so contrived they literally had us covering our eyes.
Is it just us? Have we lost our sense of fun along with our sense of romance? The characters themselves were inconsistent and hard to warm up to. Danny is presumably supposed to be boyishly charming and he has some decent moments, but he dresses like a slob no matter what the occasion, treats Katherine's kids badly and uses cringe-inducing terms like "I want to climb Palmer Mountain." As for Palmer, underneath all the packaging she is supposed to be a smart genuine person yet she falls for every outlandish lie she's told and confesses that her most painful moment was the disbanding of NSync 10 years ago. We couldn't find any basis for their relationship from either his perspective or hers, and certainly nothing to justify her traveling to Hawaii with his family or his bringing her. As for the rest of the gang - Danny's best male friend Eddie (aka Dolph) is a sophomoric moron, and Katherine's daughter Maggie is one of the most annoyingly precocious children ever to grace the screen. Katherine is the only likable character in the film.
With that said...
We actually do see some possibilities here for Katherine and Danny. Once again we have two friends that have known each other forever, that care about each other, and that can be themselves with each other. It takes a while for them to recognize their mutual attraction, and the fact that it requires Katherine to first have a complete overhaul makes us wonder if Danny will ever be anything more than an aging, superficial douche. Plus we are less than impressed with his treatment of her kids - we thought Michael's breakdown over his real father's neglect would be Danny's time to shine but instead he behaved even more appallingly than ever. That's not the kind of behavior that a lifelong bachelor is suddenly going to reform.
Nevertheless the two seem like they can be a fit, and both seemed genuinely happy at their wedding. They work and banter well together - the scenes between the two of them were the best of the film. If Danny can grow up a little and be the husband and father that Katherine and her children (well one of them) deserve, mazel tov. Otherwise it won't be long before she's asking him to Just Go.
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