2009 was a fantastic year for film and so i’m expecting an even better year in 2010. Unfortunately the UK film release schedule has been unkind to us with the 1st January releases and Spread is a horrible way to bring in the new decade, fortunately Daybreakers, It’s Complicated and the incredible The Road are out the following week.
Spread is one of those films where you think ‘what was the point of that’ after sitting through about 90 minutes of Ashton Kutcher trying to reach the American Gigolo acting heights of Richard Gere and failing miserably. But what Kutcher did show is that he has found a role as arrogant and obnoxious as himself so it kind of worked for him but did nothing for his acting reputation.
Filmed in the gorgeous setting of LA and focusing on the gorgeous people who live there we follow the ugly personality of Nikki as he supports himself by sleeping with desperate, lonely, rich old women and using their lifestyle to support his, that is until he meets the female version of himself who hunts rich men for the same gain and Nikki is torn between love or lifestyle.
Nikki (Kutcher) is a homeless, jobless drifter preying on the rich bikes of LA and living the high life on their money until they have enough of his despicable crap and he moves on to the next. He can maintain this as he has the looks and the moves to get anyone he wants.
Anne Heche plays Samantha, a rich lawyer with a place high in the hills of rich LA who becomes Nikki’s latest conquest and this time he has struck gold, using his rules and a science he has devised to get what he wants from her, puppy dog smile whilst sleeping, cooking dinner for her even though his busy phone is ringing from other women showing she’s the one for him and other nauseating efforts that don’t show that he’s a stud but show that Samantha is a desperate stupid lonely woman who’s eager to fall in love with the wrong guy. I mean come on would you leave your credit card for someone who you just met and slept with on the first night so they could buy themselves breakfast while you go to work for the whole day, No that’s stupid.
Nikki meets Heather (Margarita Levieva) who does what he does for a living and the two hit it off with them helping each other get their loaded targets but as things progress they fall in love forgetting their need for lifestyle and money and enter the world of a normal relationship, but only briefly as Heather eventually goes to New York to get married to a very rich picking of a man and Nikki, being left in the lurch with nothing, follows suit quickly making amends with everyone he has upset throughout the film thus allowing him to get money to fly to New York, confess his love and propose to Heather.
By this time I just didn’t care what happened to these two mentally vacant idiots and was happy to see them heart broken and emotionally destroyed in the build up to Heathers rejection of Nikki’s proposal in New York (gee, I hope i didn’t ruin the ending) opting to have the rich life style she always wanted instead, and I’m really suppose to feel sorry for Nikki?
The final third of the film did descend into an accidental comedy that was rushed and a mess with Heather’s previously unseen flat mate appearing from nowhere to play a key role to Nikki’s decision to go to New York and propose. That mixed with the random sex scenes throughout the film, the likes a soft core porn film would happily show, with Kutcher and Heche displaying all kinds of frolic embarrassments baring all and showing off there bodies, for their own egos and self promotion presumably, that added little to the film or the likability of both characters.
Anne Heche was probably the standout in terms of performance with a clearly paranoid and insecure ageing woman trying to hold on to her youth and to Nikki, with a random operation to tighten her vagina one of the ways, but when she instantly forgives Nikki for his extra curricular sex activities with a young blonde in her own house then I really gave up all hope that there was a character in the film who was likeable.
Overall a waste of time and effort and another vehicle for Kutcher to try to prove (to himself mainly) that he can act and show that he is more than the host of Punk’d and Demi Moore’s boyfriend but failing predictably.
Boring, predictable and utterly meaningless.
