Good Advice

Director Steve Rash has made 14 movies over a 30 year period starting 1978.  All of them are a load of crap if you consider content or the art of movie making per se.  But all of them are reasonably successful and have kept him going in a genre of movies that are more slapstick than quite a few that you would see.  I believe the concept is called carving a niche for oneself.  Our man has generated just enough eyeballs every single time to keep going.  His last 4 movies have been direct DVD releases and the one before that was a TV movie only.  The last feature film to have seen the Box Office was 10 years back with Good Advice, a movie that has been playing on the tube for ages now and was playing this night when I got back and was wondering what should I watch.  Considering that I was writing out my last of 3 reviews from last night, it was obvious that I needed a movie that I had seen before and one that you would really not miss much when you are typing out a review and may have to move focus from the screen to the keyboard for a couple of minutes.  Good Advice is the kind of movie that really doesn’t hold your attention much.  Considering that I am typing out the review while the movie is on probably its last break, you would understand what i am talking about J.

Ryan Edward Turner (Charlie Sheen) is you cocky stock broker who thinks that he is God’s gift to the human race.  He is a hot shot who is on the fast track to being partner at his firm on Wall Street.  And he is also slick with women.  He is banging Vanessa Simpson (Lisa Rinna) who is the young wife of the super rich media magnate Donald Simpson (Barry Newman).  And he is rude. Not general rude.  But rude to the extent of telling the doorman who wishes him good morning, “You are a doorman Mike.  How good can it get”? Now in between all of this, he also has a girl friend, Cindy Steyn (Denise Richards) who is the personification of the term “Bimbo”.  She writes a column at a local newspaper, The Journal, that is barely able to give people their salaries and is headed up by Page Hensen (Angie Harmon).  Page is an ambitious but sensible young woman who truly believes in the power of the press and wants to make a difference to people’s lives.

Now Donald Simpson is a ruthless business man and when he realises that Ryan has been screwing his wife, he misleads him to investing on an unknown company called Jasco Pharmaceuticals and screws Ryan backwards into losing everything that Ryan has worked for including his brokers license; not to mention his life time savings.  Left with no choice, Ryan is forced to sell everything piece by piece and move in with Cindy.  But being a couch potato is going to make things worse for Ryan and Cindy eventually runs away with her new squeeze Francisco to Brazil.  When Page calls Cindy’s home to find out her whereabouts, Ryan uses the opportunity to take over Cindy’s job as a columnist – without obviously letting anyone know.  He needs to figure out how to pay the rent right.  He says that Cindy has got the Brazilian flu and cannot come to work but she wants to run the column from home.  Page allows this and over the next few days, the column actually turns out to be a huge hit and no points for guessing that Ryan and Page fall in love – slowly but surely.

Strewn with corny one liners, Good Advice is the kind of movie you would watch only in circumstances that I have described earlier in this review.  Surely you would not have too many instances like these popping up in your daily lives.  So basically what I intend to say is that the movie is fairly avoidable.  Not much can be expected from the direction or the consistency aspects.  Charlie Sheen is his usual cocky self and so is Denise Richards.  Its really not surprising either that Angie Harmon doesn’t have too many movies under her belt.  She is just not cut out for the screen.  She comes across as sincere but struggles to put up a decent performance.  Lesser said the better about the rest of the cast.  Overall nothing more than a 4 on 10.  I guess I am being fair and not generous this time around.

Watch the trailer at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sOZw_Oatqk