One Night at McCool's (2001)
On an ordinary night, in an ordinary part of town, a beautiful young woman walks into a bar. Her name is Jewel, and before long she is chatting to bartender Randy. The pair leave together, but he ends up getting into a tussle with her criminal boyfriend, who she then shoots dead, later persuading Randy to take the rap for her. But this isn't the end of it, as both Randy's cousin Carl and the detective assigned to the murder case also fall for Jewel's charms and find themselves caught up in the ensuing events. It seems that any man who meets Jewel falls instantly in love with her, and she's going to use this fully to her own advantage, leaving a trail of havoc in her wake. It also seems that she is going to get away with it - that is, until Randy decides to hire a hitman...
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A half baked Rashomon style narrative is the central conceit that somewhat scuppers Harald Zwart's 2001 pulpy black comedy One Night At McCool's.

Liv Tyler plays Jewel Valentine, a goddess of a woman who walks into the lives of three men (Matt Dillon, John Goodman and Paul Reiser) and creates havoc. She's represented in each narrative strand as a different thing to each of them, which is rather telling example of the male psyche and its desire to see only what it wants to see in its potential partners.

Tyler naturally has the looks to play the goddess femme fatale and much of the film rightly plays on her God given attributes of great beauty. But this is more than…

One Night at McCool's is absolutely a product of that immediate post-Pulp Fiction (1994) moment in American quasi-indie cinema, when Quentin Tarantino was a literal god and Hollywood was suddenly awash in non-linear pop culture-savvy scripts about ultra-hip criminals with all the needle drops that would hit at key moments already penciled in. This movie feels like the product of one of those screenplays, just one that sat in some bottom draw for several years gathering dust, before finally being dug out and put into production. How else to explain not only the dated concept but also the very specific references to two of the hottest movies of 1993? Hardly fresh material by 2001 as even this film's defenders (if…

I could never really settle in with One Night At McCool’s. Told mostly through a series of personal flashbacks from Dillon, Reiser and Goodman. You don’t really gain a connection or an affinity for any of the characters, including Liv Tyler’s Jewel.

No one really stands out as the script is not really filled with much comedy or intrigue. Reiser plays his neurotic 90s self, Dillon is a gullible sad sack and Goodman just looked entirely uncomfortable physically in this movie. Liv Tyler looked great, but there isn’t much backstory to her character or anything else really as she’s just a Con-Woman taking the three guys for all their worth. Andrew Dice Clay gave me the most laughs at the…