AllMovie

As curiously misguided as a T & A comedy can get -- especially because it doesn't provide, at a bare minimum, the T & A -- Gregory Poirier's Tomcats is a tutorial in inept filmmaking, its flaws as perversely fascinating as a train wreck. It starts with a decent, if misogynistic, idea: a group of college buddies makes a bet to see who can go the longest without marrying, with years of mutual fund accumulations as the spoils. But instead of exploring the high/lowlights of the contest, Tomcats excises almost all of its side characters, skips ahead in time until only two are left, then sets them on a meandering series of overlong set pieces that defy all conventions for narrative cohesion. Wickedly telling examples include Jerry O'Connell's lengthy courtship of a librarian, which exists only to set up a laborious punch line about a geriatric dominatrix, and the bizarre scene in which cop Shannon Elizabeth and her partner discuss love lives while blowing away a house full of criminals. In the meantime, whole characters and subplots are abandoned for 30 to 45 minutes at a stretch. One vulgar scene scares up gales of surprised, wincing laughter, but does not come close to saving the flick. It's nice that O'Connell has grown out of his tubby phase from Stand By Me into a chiseled stud blessed with vacant charm, but roles like this make him into a different kind of embarrassment. Released within months of the moronic David Arquette vehicle See Spot Run, which Poirier wrote, Tomcats solidified its writer/director's reputation as emblematic of Hollywood's most socially bankrupt tendencies.