FILM REVIEW; Done Them Wrong: A Bad Babe for a Good Time
The New York Times Elvis Mitchell
A bartender (Matt Dillon), a lawyer (Paul Reiser) and a detective (John Goodman) each have hard-luck love stories about Jewel (Liv Tyler), an acquisitive manipulator who enters their lives and brings reams of bittersweet romance. The dark comedy is a mile wide and an inch deep, existentialism from Mad magazine, making the jokes too obvious. &#151; Elvis Mitchell
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''It's just the sex and the violence all in one night is a little much,'' Randy, a hapless bartender, blurts out in the dark comedy ''One Night at McCool's.''

But that's not the problem here. The nihilism in ''McCool's'' is a mile wide and an inch deep, existentialism from Mad magazine, making the jokes too obvious. It's grabbing you by the lapels and screaming, ''Laugh!'' A great deal of the movie is so heavily italicized that it's not very funny.

Randy (Matt Dillon), his cousin Carl the lawyer (Paul Reiser) and Detective Dehling (John Goodman) are all telling their hard-luck love stories about Jewel (Liv Tyler), an acquisitive manipulator who entered their lives and brought reams of bittersweet romance. She's like a Mounds bar in a skirt.

Randy meets Jewel after working a shift at McCool's bar. He takes her home to an ominous run-down joint that would be a fixer-upper if it were in better shape. Jewel involves him in a murder and decides to stay with him; she thinks he and the house have potential. (She carries photo collages of the dream house she has always wanted, like the wish picture of a middle-class family that James Caan kept in his wallet in ''Thief.'') Carl sees Jewel the same night and is eager to bolt his wife and children to be with her -- at least for a few hours. Dehling meets Jewel while investigating the murder and believes she is the angel sent to help him over his ache after his wife's death.

The director, Harald Zwart, keeps the energy up, initially working with a color palette that seems to have been inspired by Cool Mint Listerine -- ugly, flat blue-greens and grays -- and gradually brightens into a livelier and more realistic scheme as ''McCool's'' builds toward its climax. Each time Jewel enters one of the guys' lives, she looks like a fantasy airbrushed onto the side of a van. Maybe Mr. Zwart keeps the action too peppy; his angular stylization, in touches like filling Randy's house with the kind of junk that goes untouched at a thrift store, makes the picture seem anxious.

Stan Seidel's script, worked out to within an inch of its life, gives the director a lot of choices, which Mr. Zwart turns into a Mad Libs version of ''Rashomon'' as each man confesses his feelings to someone. Randy is spilling his guts to Burmeister (Michael Douglas), a hit man wearing a rug that looks like a fur Kangol cap and a mouthful of picket fence caps; Randy wants to hire Burmeister to bump off Jewel. Carl is blabbing to a shrink (Reba McEntire), who is left speechless by his shamelessness. And Dehling is literally confessing: to a priest, Father Jimmy (Richard Jenkins), whose reactions wouldn't be out of place in a cartoon by the frenetic animator Tex Avery. Father Jimmy wants all the details of ''sexual congress.''

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