Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (Matthew McConaughey, Jennifer Garner, Michael Douglas, Breckin Meyer, Robert Forster, Anne Archer) – Here is a shocker! Matthew McConaughey stars as a shallow womanizer in a romantic comedy where he can look pretty and not tax any acting talent he may have. Here, he plays Connor Mead, a top-notch photographer who shoots barely-dressed women and apparently beds them all. But he never sticks around long. Ever hear about this as a premise for a movie before? He heads home for his brother, Paul’s, wedding where he reunites with his life-long love – the one he would never quite commit to the longest – a girl named Jenny Perotti, played here by the engaging, if not terribly talented, Jennifer Garner. Stealing liberally from Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, the obnoxious, uncaring, cold louse is visited by ghosts of his girlfriends past plus the uncle who raised him when his parents died in an accident. Oscar winner Michael Douglas plays Uncle Wayne. Every once in a while, Douglas surfaces in a stupid role like this. I can’t figure out if he just gets tired of being at home with Cathy Zeta-Jones and their young kids or he’s just not getting any offers these days. I did see that he is going to reprise his Gordon Gecko character in Wall Street II with Oliver Stone at the helm.
Here, he is just a comic book character who taught Conner everything he knows about women and how to woo them. But he also wants to share the lessons he learned – why, we don’t know. Anyway, this is a giant waste of time and money, but then I knew it before I got to the theater. The best part of the movie is the soundtrack, featuring pop songs of the ‘80s. That’s the only nice thing I can say about the film. Here’s hoping that Mike goes back to Cathy, Jen goes back to husband Ben Affleck, and Matt does a movie more like A Time to Kill than this garbage.