You can almost hear the laughter track in this machine-made sitcom about a young guy from "an openly gay architectural practice" in Chicago assigned by a property tycoon to keep a custodial eye on his mistress.
The reasoning is, if he's gay he's safe. The premise is that gays don't do it, which is arguable. Anyhow ... It's a flat, stale, one-joke comedy of misunderstanding since the chaperone turns out to be non-gay after all.
Now that homosexuals are no longer dissed on the screen by being made into lisping figures of fun, a movie like this feels free to co-opt their "harmlessness" in a heterosexual world, until it suits the stockpot plot to declare them "normal".
It's smugly patronising: an easy ride on political correctness without paying the fare. Matthew Perry, with his bag-like face that stops just short of beefiness, is the beard for his two-timing boss (Dylan McDermott); Neve Campbell is the girl ready enough to be a mistress until a better offer comes along. They don't act, they simply re-act, as if a TV camera and studio audience were out front. Whatever sympathy such characters think they're owed doesn't last longer than the scene in which they both eat tuna melts at a greasy spoon. First he vomits; then she vomits. As my late colleague John Junor famously said, pass me the sick bag, too.
Three To Tango
Cert: 12A
