THREE TO TANGO

Directed by Damon Santostefano. Starrng Matthew Perry, Neve Campbell

On pain of castration, I must point out that I'd happily watch Neve Campbell washing dishes, dusting shelves and hoovering floors for two hours, but it's disheartening to see how dire her taste in scripts has been since the original Scream, and this lame-brained romantic comedy hardly represents a huge improvement.

Its only real saving grace is the unintentional hilarity provided by Matthew Perry's floundering attempts at comedy – he always was the most conspicuously awful actor of the Friends sextet, and he shoots his A-list career through the head here in some considerable style.

Plot: ambitious architect Oscar Novak (Perry), and his openly gay business partner (the vile Oliver Platt) are competing for an extremely lucrative restoration project, provided by a married tycoon (Dylan McDermott) who has assumed that Oscar is gay as well, and assigns him to spy on his mistress (Campbell, safely on autopilot). This forces him to befriend Campbell and hang around with her morning, noon and night while pretending to be gay: it causes him considerable anguish, especially when she's lying in the bath confiding all manner of intimate details, and the strain starts to eat him alive as the movie develops. This is compounded when he starts seeing his visage on the front cover of magazines alongside 'Gay Man Of The Year' headlines, and his rabbit-caught-in-headlights expression is a curiously compelling spectacle.

Three To Tango is the very definition of 'lightweight fluff', so it would be a waste of time getting too worked up about it, but it must be pointed out that the acting would disgrace a kiddies' pantomime, and the plot twists are even more predictable than is usually the case with these affairs. The finale is particularly overcooked, and Perry makes things considerably worse by trying to make a go of it – he looks acutely embarrassed for the most part, which at least is more than can be said for the shameless Platt.

The script has isolated moments of comic value – three of them, now that I come to think about it – but hardly enough to justify the price of admission, even in what must be the worst fortnight of film in living memory.