After watching McDreamy's latest, Made of Honor, I'm almost feeling sentimental for Can't Buy Me Love. Made of Honor is one massive turd-burger.
Dempsey plays Tom, a New York City playboy who won't see the same woman two nights in a row, yet he has the female population of Manhattan eating out of his hands. He's best-friends with Hannah (Michelle Monaghan), whom he met in college when he accidentally crawled into her bed. They have a platonic relationship, going to lunch and bakeries together--but no sex, because, you know, they're just friends.
Hannah goes off on a six-week journey to Scotland, and Tom is left all alone. He goes to lunch with dim-bulb, beautiful girls who don't follow his lunch rules like Hannah does. He eats two kinds of cake, lemon and chocolate, the two flavors he always eats with Hannah. He sleeps with these beautiful women and whines when he misses Hannah's phone calls. Poor guy.
In a plot development right out of Conventional Scriptwriting 101, Hannah meets a Scottish duke named Colin (Kevin McKidd), and they get engaged. When Hannah returns, she asks Tom to be her maid of honor. Tom accepts, but he intends to ruin Colin's chances of marrying Hannah. Tom now sees himself as the perfect man for her, even if he's a god-damned dirty man-whore.
Tom has only a few days to sabotage the wedding, because Hannah and Colin are wasting no time getting to the nuptials. What's more, Hannah is going to relocate to Scotland immediately after the wedding, so Tom won't have anybody to eat cake with. Not only does Tom have to make all the bridal-shower arrangements (in Scotland, no less), but he has to prove Colin is some kind of jackass.
Of course, the plot will have to call for Colin to be imperfect so that we won't feel all that bad when Hannah inevitably settles for Tom. How do the writers make Colin a terrible bastard who isn't good enough for Hannah, despite his being a millionaire and perfect gentleman? He won't let her share his cake--that's how! Well, he'll let her share it, but he won't let her stick her fork into his cake, 'cause that's gross. He just breaks off a piece for her instead. What an asshole!
While this is the sort of dreck I've come to expect from Dempsey, I'm supremely disappointed to see Monaghan in this garbage. She's one of my favorite leading ladies, and her supporting turn in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was worthy of Oscar consideration. Seeing her reduced to bad sitcom humor with Dempsey is heartbreaking. The actress has too much class to be the next Sandra Bullock. Please, Michelle ... take the big paycheck and go back to stuff that's worthy of you, i.e., movies that don't feature Patrick Dempsey.
Sydney Pollack shows up as Tom's dad, who is getting married for the sixth time. When we first meet him, he's drawing up a prenup that requires his new wife to blow him a certain amount of times per week (ha, ha, ha ... snort ... ha, ha, ha!). And later, we see him getting yet another divorce! (Har-dee-har-har! Ow ... my side hurts!)
Throw in your typical Scottish jokes involving haggis and bagpipes, and you pretty much have what will surely be one of the year's worst comedies.
Dempsey's best film work was probably as the dude who got the illegal monkey and caused a major viral disaster in Outbreak, and he was in that film all of 10 minutes. Actually, I thought the monkey out-acted him in that one.
