Two Girls and a Guy . Gambit Weekly . 05-11-98

Two Girls and a Guy

DIRECTED BY: James Toback

REVIEWED: 05-11-98

The premise of writer/director James Toback's partially improvised Two Girls and a Guy is that a shameless Lothario named Blake (Robert Downey Jr.) gets caught by the two women he's been dating recently, Lou (Natasha Gregson Wagner), a motor-mouthed brunette, and Carla (Heather Graham), a cool, self-possessed blond. It's bad enough that Blake has been cheating on them, but this guy is such slime that he's been wooing them with the exact same lines.

Two Girls and a Guy offers performances so commanding that we keep watching even after the film has lost its way completely. Downey makes a great sleaze, and you can see his brain churning feverishly like a rat in a maze as he tries to find an escape route. Wagner manages to display a core of vulnerable substance in a character we don't initially like. And Graham continues her rapid rise to stardom. She's soon going to be a serious candidate for roles that have gone to Uma Thurman for the last half-decade.

But this is a picture you don't believe much at the beginning, and not at all after the first 20 minutes. We restrain ourselves from sneering when the women break into Blake's apartment so they can ambush him when he comes home. But we can't help scoffing when they hang around after confronting him to drink a little whiskey, do a little nasty and confess that they aren't actually so pure themselves. Toback obviously wants to believe that everybody is promiscuous. Mark me down as somebody who doesn't.

--Rick Barton

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Two Girls and a Guy

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Two Girls and a Guy
Two Girls and a Guy

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