It took me three sittings to finish this movie. I LOVE Scott Porter. I don't hate Alexis Beidel, but this confirmed how little she can actually act. She's lucky she's beautiful, otherwise she would have nothing to offer Hollywood. I wanted to like this movie mostly because the beginning was somewhat interesting. This was until I started watching it and realized it got really bad as it kept going. By like all good train wrecks, you see it through the end.

Writer/director Julio DePietro apparently thought having a plot twist toward the end of The Good Guy was all he needed to make this movie worth watching. He was very wrong. This romantic-bromantic-comedy fails as romance, bromance and comedy and after mostly wasting 90 minutes of your life, reveals that it never really had a point to make in the first place.Tommy (Scott Porter) is a Wall Street stock broker with a pig of a boss (Andrew McCarthy), a collection of a-hole work friends (Aaron Yoo and Andrew Stewart-Jones) and a beautiful girlfriend named Beth (Alexis Bledel) who won't sleep with him. Tommy and Beth do eventually end up boinking, even though this story never presents any reason for why the two of them are together or care a whit for each other. Tommy also winds up taking a guy named Daniel (Bryan Greenberg) under his wing, getting him a job as a stock broker and trying to cultivate Daniel's personality and skill with women. Neither of those things are easy because Daniel makes Opie from The Andy Griffith Show look suave and sophisticated.As Tommy keeps pushing Daniel to hit on strange women, one of those feeble passes unknowingly ends up aimed at Beth. But wait, the film doesn't become all about how Beth is unwittingly caught between two friends because the movie almost immediately has Daniel, Tommy and Beth show up at the same party where they find out about each other. Daniel does end up joining Beth's book club with her female friends, a situation notable only for how it emphasizes how little romantic interest Beth seems to have in Daniel, while he tries hard not to openly moon over her.There's a couple of scenes thrown in there with Daniel, Tommy and his friends doing some male bonding and a couple of scenes with Beth doing girl stuff with her friends. The Good Guy then sort of stops and broods for a while before coming to a plot twist that not only had no emotional impact on me, I have no idea what emotions it was intended to stir or how it was supposed to stir them. If this movie weren't so tepid or Alexis Bledel weren't wearing so many clothes, I'd be sorely tempted to view it a second time while listening to the commentary of writer/director DePietro just to try and understand what the hell he thought was doing. I surely can't make hide nor hair of it.What makes the twist not working even worse is that after it happens, it becomes clear the story was entirely about the twist. There's nothing interesting about the relationship between Tommy and Beth. There's nothing interesting between the relationship between Beth and Daniel. The only reason the relationship between Tommy and Daniel is even marginally interesting is that it mostly occurs in the middle 20 minutes of the movie where it's trying to be funny. For those 20 minutes, there's a real effort to generate some comedy from the city mouse/country mouse dynamic between Tommy and Daniel. The 35 minutes before and after that are almost devoid of humor.Bledel and her luminescent blue eyes are nice to look at and you don't realize how stupid much of the movie is until the end when you realize the supposed foreshadowing and build up to the twist doesn't really fit. Most everything else in The Good Guy either falls flat, never rises to any point where it could fall flat or exists in the movie to kill time until it can get to the ill-conceived twist.This thing won't leave your mouth agape at how dreadful it is, but it is less entertaining than a good nap. It's not as painfully cloying as many chick flicks are, but it doesn't engage on any level at all. If you're a dude being forced to watch a chick flick, you can do worse than this. However, that's a little like saying being beaten with a rubber hose isn't as bad as getting your genitals electrocuted. You're better off avoiding those kind of experiences altogether.

Was this movie made in 1985? And shouldn't it star Molly Ringwald?Though set in the present day world of hip, young urbanites, "The Good Guy" is the movie John Hughes might have made if he'd moved his stories of teen angst out of the Chicago suburbs and into the middle of Manhattan. O.k., so the kids in this film are at least five or so years out of their teens, but the kids who starred as the teens in Hughes' films weren't really teens either, so the comparison stands.Alexis Bledel basically plays Rory Gilmore, picking up her story where the T.V. series "The Gilmore Girls" left off. She's a conscientious young do-gooder with some kind of job having to do with conservation. Her boyfriend is a Wall Street hot shot who only cares about money. Enter Bryan Greenberg, playing the new guy on her boyfriend's team, who thinks he wants to be a Wall Street shark but is far too sensitive and quiet to make it. We know he's meant to be with Bledel, because his favorite book is "Pride and Prejudice" and he's awkward with girls."The Good Guy" is almost hopelessly young and hits its notes with all the subtlety of an episode of "Melrose Place." But it has a great message to relate about life priorities, and I found it refreshing for once to find a movie in which the character of the old (32) married guy is the happiest character in the film.My wife and I did a lot of chuckling at "The Good Guy," but I admit that it won me over. And one wonders if the makers of this movie weren't more aware than I'm giving them credit for of how much it plays like an '80s teeny-bopper film, because there's good old Andrew McCarthy, not playing the dreamy heroes he used to, but rather a foul-mouthed obnoxious boss.Grade: B+

I have to start my comments with my observations about the lead actor here, Alexis Bledel. I really like her, she was perfect as a high school student in 'Gilmore Girls', she seems like a very sweet person, and very attractive. But she simply is a lousy actor. In this movie, and others, where she has been in scenes with other 20-something females, the others are always more convincing than she is. I wish she would either improve her acting skills or quit trying to handle lead roles. In one scene she asks "Have you ever been in a hot air balloon." Easy question. I asked my wife, "What did she say?" We replayed that 2 more times, neither of us could understand her. We had to put on the subtitles. There is no excuse for such poor enunciation.To the movie. Here she is Beth Vest, a successful young professional in New York, who has met a really nice guy Scott Porter as Tommy Fielding, with a successful career as a Wall Street banker. Beth begins to think maybe Tommy is "the one", but she gets offered a promotion, in San Francisco. What to do?Meanwhile the new guy at the bank, Bryan Greenberg as Daniel Seaver, seems to be an absolute zero when it comes to socializing, and especially women. Tommy gives seemingly all his free time trying to improve Daniel, even going so far as to sending him to a bookstore to meet women, encouraging him by cell phone. As fate would have it, Beth walks in and Daniel is smitten, not knowing who she is. Eventually Beth, Tommy, and Daniel all get into a romantic triangle of sorts. Andrew McCarthy looks pretty good for almost 50, who can forget him in 'Mannequin'? Here he is appropriately named Cash, and as the boss he is fond of telling Tommy and all the others, "Your job is to make money for me." Except for the excessively foul mouth, he is pretty good in this role. The rest of the guys are caricatures of young Wall Street professionals, who work the phones to make deals during the day, and spend nights boozing and chasing women. Overall a pretty poor movie, even if there had been a better actor in the role of Beth. SPOILERS: Tommy was not what he first appeared to the audience, and to Beth. While he came across as sincere, he always had several other young women, and one prostitute, just a call away. When Beth found out what was going on she quickly severed ties and it appeared that she and Daniel were well on the way to a solid relationship. Well 'solid' by Hollywood standards.