All Over the Guy (2001)

I think you have to suspend quite a bit of reality to get anything from this rather contrived story, but there are some quite familiar faces peppering the scenes as we tell, retrospectively via two conversations, of the erratic courtship of “Eli” (writer Dan Bucatinsky) and the alcoholic hunk “Tom” (Richard Ruccolo). They are brought together by the recently hooked up “Jackie” (Sasha Alexander) and “Brent” (Adam Goldberg) but it isn’t the most auspicious of starts. Indeed, after their first date you’d have got better odds on the Danube really being blue. Circumstance and their friends don’t give up easily, though, and gradually the pair begin to get to know each other and take each other, and us, on a dirty washing exercise as we learn of their childhoods and the sources of the chips on various shoulders that they have accumulated over the years. So far, it’s all entirely procedural with dramatically created troughs so we can have the peaks, but for me the thing falls flat fairly early. Sure, there is a magnetism here and both of these actors deliver competently enough, but their romance is borderline toxic at times and I think any sane person would just have chalked it up to experience and moved on right from the get-go. Serendipity is just too involved as each episode in their relationship becomes less plausible yet more cementing of a conclusion that you just know is bound to happen. The film has a custom-made, manufactured, look to the whole thing and after a while I lost interest in whether they did or didn’t and would rather have followed the sub-plot with their newly loved-up and squabbling pals. At least the production is decent enough, but this is still quite disappointing as it uses stereotypes to poke fun at, well, stereotypes.