Goodbye, Lover (1999)

Directed by Roland Joffé
Written by Joel Cohen, Ron Peer & Alec Sokolow
Starring Patricia Arquette, Dermot Mulroney, Mary-Louise Parker, Ellen DeGeneres, Don Johnson

My Advice: Wait for Cable.

Ben Dunmore (Johnson) seems to have everything: a great job at a PR firm, a loving brother Jake (Mulroney) who's in serious need of rehab, and a lover who is up for all manner of kinky pastimes.  The problem is that the aforementioned lover happens to be Jake's wife Sandra (Arquette).  When Ben decides to leave Sandra and get something real in his life, he tries for co-worker Peggy (Parker) but is unaware of what lengths Sandra will go to to either keep him or ruin him.

The cast members all do fairly well in their roles, but here's the problem.  This movie bills itself as a erotic comedy thriller.  Instead of eroticism, we have Patricia Arquette playing dress up and having sex a lot.  Instead of thrills, we have a poorly-paced bland crime drama that has all the twists and turns of a Bewitched episode.  Instead of foreshadowing events, they get thrown in as the writers decided they needed them with no setup whatsoever.  Instead of a comedy, we have no laughs at all for the first half-hour, and all the ones thereafter are provided by Ellen DeGeneres.  Her portrayal of a hard-boiled cynical detective is the film's only saving grace and the only thing to actually give it a modicum of watchability.  I'm very disappointed, since this film had two of the writers from Toy Story, Cohen and Sokolow, and Cohen was responsible for one of my favorite forgotten 80's films, Pass the Ammo.  However, in this outing what's worse than any other part is the sneaking suspicion that the creators thought they were being clever.  Better luck next time.