It seems like a good idea for fans of romantic comedies and/or Brandon Routh. Routh plays Scott Teller. Scott is a lonely, white-collar romantic in New York City who's been dumped after he drives away a girlfriend by proposing marriage too soon and his roommate moves to Germany, leaving him with a great apartment that he can't afford on his own. So, he looks for a new roommate and after interviewing the sort of absurdly unsuitable prospects who only exist in movies, he finds a young couple named Ryan and Mary (Jesse Bradford and Sophia Bush) who seem like the ideal choice. Things go well enough at first, until Scott meets a new woman who may be Mrs. Right in Leslie (Jennifer Morrison), a beautiful costume designer for a theatrical troupe. But Ryan and Mary keep getting in the way and making him look bad to Leslie in ways that are absurd and ridiculous. And the film becomes shrill and embarrassing as Ryan and Mary become increasingly over-the-top in their undercutting of his decisions, and Scott reacts in ways that are increasingly paranoid. As a result, the audience will become more and more exasperated. The script is the main culprit. It uses a framing device (flashback revealed in a bar) which contributes nothing and is abandoned before the film ends. Some of the jokes are funny, but most of them are embarrassing. The romance between Scott and Leslie seems more a convenient plot device than a real romance. The road trip at the end seems tacked on, though it might have been believable earlier in the movie. The cast is better than the screenplay, but left to founder. The affable, all-American Brandon Routh is well-cast as a nice-guy type, but he's consistently upstaged by the supporting cast, even when his character starts behaving in an irritating way. Jennifer Morrison is pretty, but her role is very underwritten and she has little to do. Thus the main focus is Ryan and Mary, the couple who's so zany they'll give viewers a migraine. Jesse Bradford, who's given good performances in the past, is saddled with an unflattering haircut and acts as if he's channeling Robert Downey, Jr before he got sober. But the one cast member who is just as bad as the script is Sohpia Bush. Though Bush is beautiful and talented, you'd never know from this shrill performance. She tries to be screamingly funny and scorchingly sexy and goes so far over the top, she acts like her co-stars are competitors for attention. Indeed, it's more like a temper tantrum than acting. Perhaps Johnny Galecki comes off best in his minor role, and he gets some of the best lines. So in spite of some capable actors and a few good scenes, I give this a thumbs down.
Review of Table for Three
