ThiefHott
Too much of everything
SpuffyWeb
Sadly Over-hyped
Fairaher
The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.
MiamiReviewer
Huh. I'm surprised this didn't get a better rating. I just watched on netflix and thought it was half decent. The acting, while not Oscar-worthy, was passable and not distractingly bad. The script, while a bit cheesy and clichéd throughout, was also fine. More importantly, I thought the ending twist was quite clever. Yes, as others have pointed out, they flash forward at the beginning of the film gives you some idea that things don't work out well in the end. But it was such a quick comment (I feel sorry for you) that it really didn't cloud the rest of my watching for the next hour. So when the story suddenly shifted and Tommy suddenly starts talking about the long day he spent with another woman, it felt like it was from left field. And then they did a great job quickly shifting the story from the point of view from other women and Tommy's other life. It felt surprisingly like you just learned you'd been duped by a cheating spouse, and had to go back and see how you'd had your rose colored glasses on for the first part of the relationship. Again, not rocket science, but i thought it was clever in a way far surpassing your average rom com.
MBunge
Writer/director Julio DePietro apparently thought having a plot twist toward the end of The Good Guy was all he needed to make this movie worth watching. He was very wrong. This romantic-bromantic-comedy fails as romance, bromance and comedy and after mostly wasting 90 minutes of your life, reveals that it never really had a point to make in the first place.Tommy (Scott Porter) is a Wall Street stock broker with a pig of a boss (Andrew McCarthy), a collection of a-hole work friends (Aaron Yoo and Andrew Stewart-Jones) and a beautiful girlfriend named Beth (Alexis Bledel) who won't sleep with him. Tommy and Beth do eventually end up boinking, even though this story never presents any reason for why the two of them are together or care a whit for each other. Tommy also winds up taking a guy named Daniel (Bryan Greenberg) under his wing, getting him a job as a stock broker and trying to cultivate Daniel's personality and skill with women. Neither of those things are easy because Daniel makes Opie from The Andy Griffith Show look suave and sophisticated.As Tommy keeps pushing Daniel to hit on strange women, one of those feeble passes unknowingly ends up aimed at Beth. But wait, the film doesn't become all about how Beth is unwittingly caught between two friends because the movie almost immediately has Daniel, Tommy and Beth show up at the same party where they find out about each other. Daniel does end up joining Beth's book club with her female friends, a situation notable only for how it emphasizes how little romantic interest Beth seems to have in Daniel, while he tries hard not to openly moon over her.There's a couple of scenes thrown in there with Daniel, Tommy and his friends doing some male bonding and a couple of scenes with Beth doing girl stuff with her friends. The Good Guy then sort of stops and broods for a while before coming to a plot twist that not only had no emotional impact on me, I have no idea what emotions it was intended to stir or how it was supposed to stir them. If this movie weren't so tepid or Alexis Bledel weren't wearing so many clothes, I'd be sorely tempted to view it a second time while listening to the commentary of writer/director DePietro just to try and understand what the hell he thought was doing. I surely can't make hide nor hair of it.What makes the twist not working even worse is that after it happens, it becomes clear the story was entirely about the twist. There's nothing interesting about the relationship between Tommy and Beth. There's nothing interesting between the relationship between Beth and Daniel. The only reason the relationship between Tommy and Daniel is even marginally interesting is that it mostly occurs in the middle 20 minutes of the movie where it's trying to be funny. For those 20 minutes, there's a real effort to generate some comedy from the city mouse/country mouse dynamic between Tommy and Daniel. The 35 minutes before and after that are almost devoid of humor.Bledel and her luminescent blue eyes are nice to look at and you don't realize how stupid much of the movie is until the end when you realize the supposed foreshadowing and build up to the twist doesn't really fit. Most everything else in The Good Guy either falls flat, never rises to any point where it could fall flat or exists in the movie to kill time until it can get to the ill-conceived twist.This thing won't leave your mouth agape at how dreadful it is, but it is less entertaining than a good nap. It's not as painfully cloying as many chick flicks are, but it doesn't engage on any level at all. If you're a dude being forced to watch a chick flick, you can do worse than this. However, that's a little like saying being beaten with a rubber hose isn't as bad as getting your genitals electrocuted. You're better off avoiding those kind of experiences altogether.
rinoa-3
"The Good Guy" was one of the "comedy/romance" films I got myself when, for the first time in my life, I found myself craving a chick flick (which I usually despise) to relieve myself of the stress I've been immersed in lately. To tell the truth, I only chose it for Alexis Bledel (not because I find her a particularly good actress, but because she gives me that cozy familiar feeling that I was looking for) and because the movie poster looked good (now that's a futile reason). Since I looked it up beforehand, I knew it was rated 6.2/10 on IMDb, so my expectations were pretty low -- I tend to be a hard critic. However, I was up for a surprise: to begin with, I got something that could and SHOULD have been labeled as "drama" as well. In fact, "The Good Guy" has very little "comedy" to it, except for the intelligent, well-measured and well-placed jokes that make the film even more enjoyable without detracting from the story's seriousness or credibility.This film focuses on a very interesting concept that Beth (Alexis Bledel) directly alludes to in a scene where she mentions "The Good Soldier", a book sharing the same basic idea: that we automatically trust a story's narrator out of habit, without taking the time to realize there might be other versions to the events, and that they may not be as innocent as they make themselves look. "The Good Guy" takes on this challenge amazingly well by presenting us with a likable protagonist/narrator (Scott Porter's character, Tommy) that, as the story unfolds, turns out to be (pardon the language) a total jerk, and definitely not trustworthy at all. His betrayal is not only harshly felt by Beth, his girlfriend, but also -- and this is the highly praise-worthy part -- by the viewer, who does not see it coming, partially because the well-constructed events make the "twist" very subtle at first, and partially because, well, he is the narrator, after all! -- this unexpectedness is a lot like what being betrayed in real life actually feels like, and that's why the film becomes so personal, making it even easier to hate Tommy and relate to what Beth is going through. In fact, the story is so well-built that, in the beginning, Beth seems to be the more loose, less trustworthy one, and you expect her to mess up somehow -- until the tables turn and the truth about Tommy is exposed, leaving us, the viewers, with a feeling of having been cheated on by the narrator, who has made fools of us all along, as he has Beth.In addition to a very original and successfully achieved core concept, "The Good Guy" is composed of decent enough acting and directing (with a few minor mistakes -- but it must be noted that Julio DePietro is a newcomer), is never boring, is funny only when it has to be (and serious most of the time) and does NOT overdo the cheesiness that necessarily derives from its "romance" label: on the contrary, the story and characters feel realistic enough; everything seems "possible", and everyone's actions are justifiable.All in all, where I expected a light chick flick, I ended up with something much better: a light relationship drama, with some comedy and romance mixed into it. While it is certainly not a great film, The Good Guy is a very enjoyable one with many strong points, and definitely deserves more than the 6.2 IMDb is currently giving it.
mayylalaa93
Basically, it's about a Wall Street guy named Tom Fielding (Scott Porter) who's dating Alexis Bledel's character, Beth. She's too stupid to realize that he is cheating on her, despite her bitter girlfriends warning her over and over again. Tom has a new employee, Daniel Seaver (Bryan Greenberg) who does not have a personality, so he teaches him how to be a successful trader on Wall Street. Beth and Daniel have a spark. They get together in the end when she realizes that the successful Wall Street guy is a dirty cheater and has been since forever.OH! But there's a twist! The beginning is actually the end. How clever.Oh and Tom turns out to be the bad guy. Throw in an Asian and a black guy to spice things up, so they wouldn't be criticized for no diversity. Well, got that covered, now how about the script...I could not stop banging my head with my palm because every line made me shiver. Every line was just another cliché line. It's a horrible "romantic" flick filled with the lines of every other romantic Hollywood movie. Characters weren't developed well enough. Hell, they weren't developed at all, so there was really nothing to this film. I did not feel any connection between the characters. They tried to show the comfortable relationships that surround the group of friends with constant cursing. It shouldn't be rated R because there wasn't any sexual content that was unbearable; there were no naked bodies and aside from the cursing, there was nothing insane. Glad it was a short hour and 37 minutes. AND DON'T EVEN TRY TO UNDERSTAND THEIR CONVERSATIONS. THEY'RE NOT UNDERSTANDABLE.And Bryan Greenberg is too good to be on this piece of sh-t. He was on One Tree Hill, damn it. As for the others, I do not give a ...Gilmore Girls suxxxx.
