Girl crazy

>> Liv Tyler is trouble in One Night at McCool's

by JOANNE LATIMER

One Night at McCool's is, at heart, a two-hour Budweiser commercial featuring Liv Tyler. She wears wet dresses. She drinks from a hose while washing a car, then writhes around on the hood in soapy water. Needless to say, this occurs in slow motion. She sachets into nightclubs, licking things, recalling the expression, "Here comes trouble."

Trouble she is. Tyler plays a wide-eyed dame who reduces men to morons. One Night at McCool's is their story. It's told from three perspectives, with each moron recounting his fall from grace into the arms of Tyler. Director Harald Zwart keeps the pulp factor high, with helpful doses of silliness and goofball sight gags. It isn't a fantastically fun movie, but it slides easily into that category of half-baked comedies perhaps best known as a "good rental."

Matt Dillon plays the lead chump. He's a bartender who saves Tyler from her abusive boyfriend, Andrew Dice Clay. Tyler asks herself back to Dillon's place, where she cases the joint and calls in Dice Clay to do the robbery. Things go wrong and people end up dead. Tyler pouts her way out of suspicion when the cops arrive.

Meanwhile, Dillon's cousin, played by Paul Reiser, also falls for Tyler. He's a sleazeball who happens to be a lawyer and S&M guy from the suburbs. Reiser is so bent out of shape for Tyler that he goes to a shrink (Reba McEntire) to confess his attraction. The next confession comes from a cop (John Goodman) who tells his priest how protecting Tyler has changed his life for the better--despite how he destroyed evidence to save her from the slammer.

Poor Dillon finds all the trouble he ever wanted with Tyler and hires a hit man (Michael Douglas) to get rid of her before she confiscates his family's house and gets him arrested for domestic abuse.

One Night at McCool's has its share of lawyer jokes, bingo jokes and Village People jokes (nothing terribly original here). The bad rug worn by Douglas is worth a good laugh and Tyler's obsession with interior decoration is a funny spin on the Martha Stewart impulse. But the movie isn't a side-splitter. Any comedy where Dice Clay is called upon to play an avenging Mormon with a shotgun can't take itself too seriously and that's undoubtedly the best approach to One Night at McCool's.

One Night at McCool's opens Friday, April 27