I have no idea why I chose to watch this intensely irritating comedy when I found the whole premise of the story so offensive.  Maybe just like the movie’s protagonist I am pretty and shallow too and was simply wooed by the images of hunky half naked men on the DVD cover, either way it was a bad call that I very quickly regretted. 

Paul’s been dumped and Brad his ex boyfriend has already moved on and has a hot new squeeze called Ted on his arm.  All three men work in the same advertising agency and so Paul gets to see at close quarters how happy Brad is now, and he wants some of that.  He decides one day that he still wants Brad and will do anything to win him back. And by anything he means by appealing to Brad’s good nature and getting his unfettered sympathy by pretending he has cancer. Nasty plan, but he’s really not a nice man at all.

To make this audacious fraud work he involves his best friend a Doctor and then without a second thought breaks the ‘news’ of his life-threatening condition to his workmates and his parents.  It does the trick and very quickly Brad is thinking that Paul has little time to live and believes that as he may be in fact the one true love of his life (as if) he should do anything to make him happy.

If the reality of his abhorrent plot is not bad enough, the very fact Paul remains a thoroughly smug and disagreeable man throughout means that he does not deserve any of our sympathy let alone a really nice young man like Brad.

I hated a very similar story line in ‘The Lie’ where   a man feigned sick to avoid work,  and I loathed this one even more.  True if you can overlook all of this  the movie does have a few good one liners, and the men are hot ….. but is that really enough?  Even for one who is shallow (but not really that pretty)?

★★★