CAST: Ashton Kutcher, Anne Heche, Margarita Levieva
CLASSIFICATION: 16 LSN
RUNNING TIME: 97 minutes
RATING: **
Ashton Kutcher surprises with some gritty insight into the dark side of Hollywood, overcoming some gratuitous soft porn moments that has you wondering whether he'll urge Demi Moore's kids to watch this film.
He plays a young-ish Lotharia named Nikki who gravitated to Hollywood with the dream of making it big, alongside thousands of others like him.
He survives from hand-to-mouth on his looks, doing sexual favours for older women in exchange for a place to stay, a car to drive ... survival Hollywood-style, really.
The dry voice-over puts you in the picture as to how unfazed he is by the way Samantha (Heche), his latest mark, sees right through him because he has no problems with being vacuous, materialistic, vain, and basically a jerk.
At no point do you ever care what happens to Nikki because there's nothing redeeming about his behaviour, motivation, not even when he maybe, kind of, cares for another human being in the form Heather (Levieva). When she turns the tables on him, you cheer.
While the storyline does go quite dark, painting a very negative picture of the vacuous denizens of Hollywood and their obsession with materialism, it never goes far enough. The film ends up being a celebration of the superficial with no moral compunction and no reason for the viewer to care.
Turns out karma is a bitch if you're a beautiful person, but not always.
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