Review: Andrew Dice Clay salvages ‘One Night at McCool’s’

Geoff Carter

Thursday, April 26, 2001 | 9:04 a.m.

One Night at McCool's

Grade: Two-and-a-half stars

Starring: Liv Tyler, Matt Dillon, Paul Reiser, John Goodman and Michael Douglas

Screenplay: Stan Seidel.

Director: Harald Zwart.

Rated: R for violence, sexuality and language.

Running time: 93 minutes.

I'm going to break a few precedents in the following paragraph: Andrew Dice Clay was the most enjoyable actor in Harald Zwart's "One Night at McCool's." He played his dual roles with precise comic timing. The movie could have used more of him.

Clay plays a longhaired hood named Utah and his twin brother -- an unnamed Mormon caricature who looks eerily similar to Michael Douglas' crazed suburbanite in "Falling Down" (Douglas plays a one-note dirtbag in this film, wearing a wig patterned after his late father's middle-aged hairdo). Clay delivers the film's funniest line and more importantly, his work doesn't recall anything he's done before -- which is more than could be said for everyone else in the film, and the film itself.

"One Night at McCool's" is a funny film because other films before it were funny -- "It Happened One Night," "Wild Things," even "Aliens" get raided for chuckles. There's barely an element here that isn't shopworn: Matt Dillon's loveless, well-intentioned slacker; John Goodman's cop with a heart of gold; Paul Reiser's sleazy lawyer; the telling of the story through flashbacks. (The problem with this kind of storytelling is that you're never quite sure what happened -- or in this case, if anything really happened at all.)

The party that fires them up and brings them all together comes straight from screwball comedy: Liv Tyler's Jewel Valentine, a leggy, dewy-faced homewrecker. Tyler is the pivot upon which "McCool's" spins out of control. She's meant to be outrageously sexy and Zwart hammers the point home with an excess of soft focus, slow pans and tight close-ups on her unwavering pout. Dillon's hapless bartender almost has no choice but to fall for her, invite her into his home and begin perpetrating a series of robberies to feed her need for home furnishings.

But do we buy her? I almost didn't. Zwart seems all too aware of Tyler's rock-star lineage (she's the daughter of Aerosmith singer Steven Tyler) and frames her in a series of rock video vignettes -- Tyler spraying herself with a hose while washing the car, Tyler licking fingers (hers and others), Tyler seducing Reiser's wife.

Zwart is making a point about how these men see her and in doing so renders her as absurd a fantasy-figure as Jessica Rabbit. Unlike, say, Cameron Diaz -- who can make this kind of sexuality ring with comic possibility -- Tyler, through inexperience, stops the laughs dead under Zwart's heavy hand. She's a straight player in a field of straight players. Most of the real laughs come from the periphery -- from Reba McEntire's beleaguered psychiatrist, from Douglas' wig, from Reiser's goofy wardrobe (you'll see) and from the aforementioned Andrew Dice Clay, who needs more scenery to chew.

It's not until the third act, when all the men in the picture are thrown together, that "McCool's" begins kicking. Black comedy doesn't get any better than this: a standoff between the principals -- one of which is garbed in full bondage drag -- set to the tune of the Village People's "YMCA." It's the breeziest, least forced part of the story -- and it features the Diceman. Give in to the experience; it's the only way you're going to have a good time at this party. Badda-bing!