It's natural to feel an instant sense of moral superiority over I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, particularly if you're familiar with its writer/producer/main character. The real-world Tucker Max, portrayed here by Matt Czuchry, is famous for trumpeting his sexual exploits with a devilish grin, and has been accused of promoting a culture of date rape. What's more, when we meet his character here, he's having sex with a deaf girl -- part of his checklist of exotic conquests, which he considers a new frontier in his personal battle of the sexes. But many of these (correct) preconceptions about Max diverge from the reality of this movie, in the following way: Max is not so much glamorizing his lifestyle as dramatizing its inevitable shortcomings. If Bob Gosse's film existed merely to stroke its subject's considerable ego, Max wouldn't want to include the three separate episodes where his aggressive tactics fail stupendously. And when he does move toward bedding a prospect, he gets a particularly nasty comeuppance that permanently disqualifies the film from seeming like a vanity project. I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell contains other counterintuitive surprises, like the overwhelmingly positive portrayal of its female leads. Keri Lynn Pratt sweetly sidesteps the usual clichés of the bride who loathes bachelor parties, and Marika Dominczyk shines as the stripper who goes toe-to-toe with Max's acerbic friend (Jesse Bradford), giving the "whore with the heart of gold" archetype her own empowering spin. Granted, it's possible this film is just Max trying to have the last laugh. It's possible he's just trying to manipulate us, to show us that an infamous misogynist can subscribe to conventional cinematic morality for the betterment of his own image. Then again, if so, it didn't work. Few people saw the film, and most critics hated it.