“What Love Is” is a rather Valentine-y title for a movie that trades in gleeful vulgarity and trash-talk. It doesn’t quite fit the film’s atmosphere of stag-party apocalypse.
Except for a brief prologue, the movie takes place in the home of Tom (Cuba Gooding Jr.), a man whose girlfriend has just walked out on him. It’s Valentine’s Day, late at night, and Tom has invited his best buddies over to the house.
The guys troop in, each taking up a different position on the eternal subject of men vs. women. There’s misogynist spitfire Sal (Matthew Lillard), who stakes out the most belligerently Neanderthal opinion in the group; sardonic Ken (Mars Callahan, the film’s writer-director), who seems happily enough married; tree-hugging George (Sean Astin), a sensitive male; and Wayne (Andrew Daly), who is gay.
For the first 40 minutes or so of the movie, these boys stand around and fire off dialogue that sounds like an unholy blend of Neil LaBute, Kevin Smith and Andrew Dice Clay. Some of it is funny, if incredibly rude.
You can see what writer-director Callahan is going for: the male animal in extreme circumstances. But where a writer like David Mamet can mine this material for corrosive observations, “What Love Is” mostly offers the wisdom of a beer commercial.
A gaggle of party girls arrives, which is the excuse for a gratuitous fantasy sequence in which they appear as strippers. Then there’s a moment of all-female talk in the bathroom, after which they mingle with the boys.
The female cast includes Anne Heche, Gina Gershon and Tamala Jones, and while they occasionally get the upper hand on the guys, their characters still sound suspiciously like fantasies. Worse, the movie’s breakdown into two-person conversations dissipates the promising fury of its opening act.
As a director, Callahan lets the actors pretty far off the leash, so a lot of the movie is grandstanding (interestingly enough, he gives the subtlest performance). The frequent reaction shots to characters laughing at each other’s lines are a pushy way of reminding the audience to laugh too.
It would have been interesting if some of the actors had swapped roles – if the abrasive Matthew Lillard had played laid-back Ken, or Cuba Gooding the caustic Sal, for instance. As it is, everything here is a little too on-the-nose, even if the idea is an intriguing one.
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