Shot in Santa Susana, Calif., with an oddly assorted cast of English actors playing English, Americans playing English, and Americans playing American, John Cosgrove's comedy of errors aspires to farcical nuttiness but merely feels high-strung.
Rachel (Marsha Thomason), manager of London's cozy Black Cat Cafe, is having a monumentally bad day and the place is barely open. Not only did her boyfriend Charlie (Callum Blue) just admit to cheating on her with twins, but he tried to downplay the offense by arguing that it meant nothing, should only count as a single infidelity because he slept with both at once, and did he mention they were twins? The really bad part is that Charlie is the cafe's chef, and at some point today the manager of the upscale restaurant where Rachel has secretly applied for a job is stopping by. Actually, that's only one of the really bad parts: Waiter/aspiring novelist Dylan (Breckin Meyer) keeps going outside to see whether his agent has called; waitress Vanessa (Mena Suvari) has parked her clinically deranged grandma (Roz Witt) in a quiet corner in hopes that she doesn't have an outburst (she in fact has had several); and lead waiter Tom (Mark Pellegrino), whom Rachel appoints temporary chef, can't throw together a simple pasta special — his lasagna comes out smelling like dirty laundry. Who knew there were gay men who can't cook? Stoners Danny (Mike Vogel) and Mike (Andrew Lee Potts) arrive high and get steadily higher in the men's room; Danny inadvertently causes a rift between bookish Gloria (Sonya Walger) and her uptight boyfriend (Orlando Seale) by outing her as a former porn star; and Mike's ex-girlfriend (Katherine Heigl, of TV's Grey's Anatomy), whom he dumped in a fit of juvenile commitment-phobia, is a few tables over putting a good face on the worst blind date ever (Daz Crawford). Not to mention the rumor blazing through the kitchen that Rachel and Dylan had a late-night fling in her office. It all adds up to 90 minutes of ludicrously crossed signals, missed opportunities to behave like adults, and all-around hysteria... and not in the funny sense of that word.
The genial and generally appealing cast does what it can with Dean Craig's frantic script, but there's a limit to what they can do with tired fag gags and twit comedy; the treatment of Vanessa's poor mad granny seems especially coarse and mean-spirited. leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh
