Nice Guy Johnny

Nice Guy Johnny
"Johnny Rizzo, is about to trade his dream job in talk radio for some snooze-ville gig that'll pay enough to please his fiancée. Enter Uncle Terry, a rascally womanizer set on turning a weekend in the Hamptons into an eye-opening fling for his nephew. Nice guy Johnny's not interested, of course, but then he meets the lovely Brooke, who challenges Johnny to make the toughest decision of is life."

3.5 Stars

How many marriages happen just because two people are in a relationship and they are at the age where they're supposed to get married?  The answer may differ for everyone, but I tend to think it happens a lot more than people would like to admit.  This seems to be the case for Johnny Rizzo (Matt Bush), an aspiring Sportscaster with a late night sports talk radio program in Oakland, CA.  He's torn between doing what makes him happy, and pleasing a demanding fiance.  On a weekend in New York to interview for an unbelievably boring job as a warehouse manager for a cardboard company, he is (to a certain degree) kidnapped by his womanizing Uncle Terry (Ed Burns) who appears to be sleeping with every unhappy housewife East of Montauk.  Uncle Terry seems to say the things that most of us may dismiss as crude, but secretly admit they hold some validity.  Whether he's acting off of actual perception or not, Terry makes is his mission to make Johnny truly question if he wants to get married, or if he's just doing it because everyone else expects him to.  As much as Johnny tries to be dismissive of Terry's initial attempts, his resolve is slowly eroded away until he isn't sure what he really wants.

Enter Brooke (Kerry Bishe) playing the free spirited tennis instructor to the rich who clearly represents the opposite of Johnny's overbearing fiance.  The story does suffer a little here because the two female characters are written, to an extent, as cliches.  Johnny's fiance is selfish, materialistic, and almost completely without redeeming qualities.  Brooke, on the other hand, is beautiful, fun, and much more supportive of Rizzo following his dream.  But the cliches can be forgiven because of the genuine performance put forth by Bush and Bishe.  I had seen Kerry in her last season stint as the lead role on Scrubs, and I really respected her comedic mettle, but Brooke seemed to be a much more complete character.  One of the first problems I had with the romance was the height difference between Brooke and the diminutive Johnny, but the chemistry is so good that you tend to overlook that pretty quickly.

Now, one of the recurring themes of the movie is that Johnny is a nice guy "almost to a fault".  And, while he does live up to that title for the most part, he does succumb to kissing a drunken Brooke less than 12 hours from arriving in the Hamptons.  So, while he may think he has a tough decision to make and he is completely vested in his current relationship, it may be a little more talk than substance.

If the numbers are correct, this film was made on a minuscule $25k budget, and the truth is you really can't tell.  Aside from the cast being relatively small, the production as a whole comes off as top notch which is probably a testament to Ed Burns' career knack for making good films on shoe string budgets.  And, while it may not be garnering any awards, the message is pretty simple: Most of the world is going to hear your dreams and tell you that "you can't".  So, you have to find someone who looks at you truthfully and says "of course you can".  Life is long and hard, and we all want to find someone who will stand by our side while we make our way through it.  But the truth is, marriage is an institution that can't be entered into lightly.  Will Brooke be the girls of Johnny's dreams and will they live happily ever after?  Maybe or maybe not.  But what Johnny has learned is that, for him to be the best for those around him, he has to do what makes him happy.