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Tomcats: The last one standing will get the kitty. Well, you might as well give
Tomcats, a senseless, raunchy comedy, to the dogs!
Here's the plot. Six men in their late teens are hard-core bachelors and call themselves
tomcats. They make a bet on who will be the last to get married. They each contribute a few hundred dollars a year that'll go to the last standing (read unmarried) tomcat.
They invest this and after seven years, the pot has grown to half a million dollars and only two bachelors remain: Michael (Jerry O'Connel) and Kyle (Jake Busey). Michael
stupidly loses $51,000 in a casino while trying to impress a woman and the only way out is if he gets the tomcat money. He schemes to get Kyle married through the help of
Natalie (Shannon Elizabeth), an undercover police officer with whom Kyle had a short-lived affair. Problem is Kyle has no intention of settling down, and Michael starts to
fall in love with Natalie.
Tomcats is
the directorial debut of Gregory Poirier. It would have been better if he just concentrated on being an accomplished screenwriter. The story and the plot are the tried and
tired formula for sexual comedies: gross humor which is predictable and disgusting. There's no acting to speak of, the music is hohumm, the dialogue vulgar and the make-up
unrealistic (e.g. a character falls from a huge rock but shows not the slightest welt nor scratch!). Most of the shots are exploitative and fail to evoke sympathy for the
characters.
As a movie for adults, Tomcats
does not show a glimpse of mature adult behavior and belittles an adult's rational endowment. Sex is presented here as just one of those instinctive activities as yawning, engaged in by men without the slightest hint of any personal relationship. Women here are violated and used as sex objects. They are not respected to the point that their dignity is debased. It also presents men as immature, sex-adventure seeking and starving "animals" who lose rationality at the sight of a cleavage. Although Michael comes to an awakening when he says: "I finally found someone who matters more to me than I matter to myself," this message gets lost in the barrage of vulgarity and crudeness. In fact, sex is totally separated from affection and commitment. Kyle even says, "Love's got nothing to do with it." For a 95 minute film,
Tomcats
goes over previous works in the same genre by showing more than 20 episodes/scenes of gross and offensive humor. Here's a sampling: jokes about sadomasochism with a mousy librarian and her grandmother; two men masturbating in a sperm bank; pedophilia; a testes removed through surgery is stolen from the waste storage room and bounces around the hospital until it lands on the plate of a surgeon who eats it; a man suspects his wife of engaging in lesbian sex, catches her and gets offended until he excitedly joins them upon her invitation.
If all the visual details were to be described, you will understand why CINEMA rates
Tomcats not for public viewing.
(Date reviewed: July 20, 2001)
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