Bland, lazy, unimaginative and unfunny with nobody apparently putting a single bit of effort into it
28 October 2007
Tom thinks he has been asked out by the sexy daughter of his manic yet powerful boss but when he arrives at her house he finds that he has actually been asked to house-sit while she parties. His boss Jack Taylor leaves him instructions, very strict instructions and all Tom hopes to do is get through the evening without doing anything negative at all. However it is not just the obvious things that go wrong for Tom, but things that would seem unlikely and absurd to any normal person.

I watch hundreds of films a year covering all sorts of genres, countries and periods. I do not say this as a boast (really, is this anything to be proud of?) but rather to highlight what I mean when I get to my next sentence. I rarely turn a film off or walk out before the end. Rarely, in fact I can only think of one or two where I wrote a review based on part of the film. I don't always do this because I think it will get better but rather because I have a touch of the compulsive behaviour about me and I just prefer to watch the whole thing so I can give my opinion in an informed manner.

So, with this film please feel free to ignore my views on the basis that I switched off at the 60 minute mark, unwilling and unable to stand the film for any of the remaining thirty minutes. I found the 60 minutes that I enduring to be incredibly lazy and contrived with not even a single laugh to cover for it. The entire (from my point of view) film was based around Tom house-sitting due to a misunderstanding whereby he thought he would actually have been dating Lisa Taylor, the character who is the title's daughter of the title's boss. If you have not seen the film you may be shocked to learn that this house-sitting period is not event free, in fact it is pretty much a case of one thing going wrong after another, whether it is a drug deal, a cheating boyfriend, a sexy girl with a great body, a missing owl or some mice getting loose. Be sure – if it can go wrong it does.

Sadly what this "craziness" does not produce is a single laugh or even a single moment where I believed the story was written by a human as opposed to a machine, no, scratch that – a committee of machines. It isn't really predictable, because who predicted a criminal trying to recover drugs as part of the story, it is just that nothing that happens has any wit, humour or imagination about it. I tired of it quickly and literally the best thing I can say about it was that I managed about an hour before bailing out. The cast are rubbish but in fairness it is the material that leaves them out on their own. Kutcher is poor and, to provide a frame of reference – is poor by his own standards. I often thought he was asleep. Aside from a bit of a sexy dance and the fact that short blonde women are lovely, Reid does nothing. The rest of the cast features faces such as Thompson, Tambor, Madsen and others but none are any good. Electra has a great body but that alone accounts for a few minutes of the sixty I sat through.

Overall then, a pointlessly bland film. There wasn't anything that struck me as being "terrible" but rather it was just 100% bland and uninteresting – which I almost think is worse than being bad. You can understand if people are not capable of doing something but seeing everyone putting in so little effort is that bit more insulting. Perhaps it turned into Citizen Kane in the final thirty minutes but I'll never know because the two-thirds I saw was so banal and pointless that I thought switching it off was the only safe option I had.
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