Tom (Freddie Prinze, Jr) lives in a nice house in the suburbs. He’s got a beautiful wife (Monica Potter) and a couple of teenage kids. On paper, he’s got it all together. So, why is he so unhappy? In an early scene, we’ll see him on the phone with a friend and Tom asks, “Am I a good person?” We’ll quickly learn the answer to that question.
No. No he is not a good person.
Tom is having an affair with a much younger woman (Gabrielle Haugh). On his birthday he slips off work a little early and she comes over for a little fun in the pool. But they have an argument over whether or not he’ll ever leave his wife, and what her husband would do if he found out about them. Before too long she finds herself dead and he finds himself hiding her body in a pool cubby.
Before he can do anything else a bunch of people come over for a surprise birthday party.
We see the events with the mistress in choppy flashbacks. The film is coy about exactly what happened to her and why. In the present Tom slowly goes mad having to deal with a myriad of party guests, his spiteful father-in-law (Kevin Pollak), and a wife who increasingly thinks something is up.
That’s a good plot and it could be either a truly entertaining thriller or a very dark satiric comedy, but unfortunately, it is neither. Mostly it is just bland.
The thing is Tom is kind of an asshole. One of the first things we know about him is that he’s cheating on his wife with a girl who is his daughter’s age. He doesn’t seem to know half the people invited to his own birthday party and the ones he does know he doesn’t seem to like (and most of those are bros he works with). He’s hapless and sad. He’s the kind of guy who keeps thinking he has a plan to solve all his problems, but he can’t actually come up with anything other than yell at everybody.
But he’s not the kind of asshole you can love either. This isn’t Walter White or Tony Soprano – horrible people who we, if not identify with at least we can love to watch.
Every character in this film is kind of awful if I’m being honest. His friends are obnoxious, and his father-in-law is actively hateful. Even his wife and kids come off as disinterested.
You can make a great film filled with terrible people – Goodfellas comes immediately to mind. But I just never cared about any of these people, especially Tom. I never cared who killed the girl, or why he was hiding the body. I didn’t care if he got caught. So there was no real tension or interest.
Freddie Prinze, Jr. is one of a slew of actors including Sarah Michelle Gellar, Matthew Lillard, Josh Hartnett, and Jennifer Love Hewitt who were huge in the late 1990s and early 2000s. But unlike those other actors, I never liked Freddie Prinze, Jr. I never thought he was a good actor. But his low-key woodenness works for him here. The rest of the cast is fine as well, so I think it is the script and direction that just didn’t work for me.
themidnightcafe.org 