DVD Reviews

Spread

• Rating:
• Director: David Mackenzie
• Starring: Anne Heche
• Details: US / 97mins (18).

A peek in the world of a soulless Hollywood playboy, Spread might be dripping in sex but it's as cutting edge as Ashton Kutcher's arse, which is on display throughout. Kutcher plays a character that bemoans that Hollywood didn't turn out to be the Van Halen video he thought it would be. The irony is that, if Spread is anything to go by, it very much is and the movie has as much depth as those three-minute videos. And Ashton Kutcher's arse.
"I don't want to be arrogant but I'm a terribly attractive man." Kutcher plays Nikki, an American Gigolo, a Dirty Rotten Scoundrel, a Playa. Nikki uses his good looks to snare rich women at parties and mooches off them until they realise he's a rat and boot him out. As Spread opens, Nikki has already moved from his last scam to his next one - Samantha (an unrecognisable Anne Heche). Spending his days lounging about in her pool, eating her food and drinking her wine (and having mind-blowing sex), Nikki is distracted from the job at hand by waitress Heather (Levieva). When he learns she's a hustler too he tries to convince her he's for real and to dump her sugar daddy.
Spread suffers the same fate as Priceless, that 2008 Audrey Tautou rom-com that saw her flirt her way into rich men's beds - how can you root for someone so shallow, so egotistical, so emotionally dead? It wouldn't be so bad if you weren't supposed to root for Kutcher's Nikki, but director David Mackenzie (Hallam Foe) and writer Jason Dean Hall want us to: the audience is asked to stop shaking their heads at Nikki's conceited ways and get behind his attempts to land the girl. No dice. Neither can we feel sorry for the women he treats badly - if they keep coming back for more they don't deserve an audience's sympathy.
Nothing in this movie rings true. The script is written by first timer Hall who, on the back of this, knows little about women and has cobbled together information on the opposite sex from MTV's Spring Break special. It's hard to believe that any woman's first reaction to finding their kept man receiving oral sex from a bimbo is to have sex with him. But this typically absurd reaction to a typically implausible situation is rife in Spread. It's also hard to believe that Heche's 40-something uptown lawyer would need to reduce herself to this level of humiliation, and it's really hard to believe that a hustler would fall for a fellow hustler - wouldn't it be like looking into an ugly mirror every time they walk into the room? Why would a hustler, if she has a sugar daddy and drives a flashy sports car, need to work in a coffee shop? And why is Nikki like this? We never find out.
And why does this movie exist? Another question goes unanswered.

Review by Gavin Burke