The Third Wheel Movie Review

After Good Will Hunting and a round of Project Greenlight, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon got their hooks into this odd choice, a screwball romantic comedy called The Third Wheel, which plays out exactly like you might expect.

After a half hour of setting up the leads (Luke Wilson and Denise Richards, co-workers in a finance film which is featured endlessly in the first act to the point of mind numbness), Wilson finally asks Richards out on a date -- after a year of pining for her. Things immediately take a turn for the worse when Wilson runs his car into a crazy homeless man (Jay Lacopo), who ends up joining them for the rest of the evening. Get it? He's a third wheel! And he's kooky. How do we know he's kooky? He sings on the bus and makes hand shadows on the wall.

Lacopo's nut has a hidden agenda, which we'll find out in the end (that is, before the lip-sync dance number that plays over the closing credits), and along the way we'll get to see the duo's co-workers betting over how far their little romance will get over the course of the evening. Spies (from Affleck to Office Space "oh face" guy Greg Pitts) keep tabs on them, while Wilson spews out endless insecurities and Richards exudes her typical sexuality. As a couple, there's zero chemistry between the two, and that pretty much sinks the movie from the start. But a bigger issue is that the movie just isn't funny. A romantic comedy without romance can be passable, but without the comedy part, you're sunk.

Never mind that the cover tells us the film is "from one of the producers of American Pie," in the end I was starting to feel like I was the third wheel in the relationship between the DVD and my DVD player.

Once, twice, three times a lady.