So, I know these movies that I write about are supposed to be enjoyable, but there are quite a few on my list that I want to talk about that are just…not good. Most of these happen to be sex comedies; movies which can be argued are even lower hanging fruit than low-budget horror when it comes to talking about bad movies. Some of them seem to follow the formula of just cramming a bunch of crude jokes into ninety minutes, but then there are some, like today’s feature, that are just complete mindfucks. This one is not only misogynistic, but also features a terribly insensitive gay panic subplot and more than a handful of pedophile jokes. Sounds awful, right? What movie am I talking about? Why, none other than Buying the Cow (2002), a Walt Becker feature starring Jerry O’Connell of Mariah Carey “Heartbreaker” music video soda-in-the-lap fame, and featuring a pre-fame Ryan Reynolds.
This movie exists solely to question the notion of a soulmate and the anxiety over lifelong commitment, and everything this movie seems to learn, it promptly unlearns to go back on itself by the end. The movie is about David and Sarah, a couple who have been dating for years, and David’s group of friends, both single and engaged. Sarah wants David to pop the question and David doesn’t think he’s been with enough women, especially as he’s still obsessed with a woman he met by chance years ago, worrying about marrying Sarah when his soulmate is still out there. That’s pretty much the whole movie, but they still manage to shove a whole bunch of head-shaking moments and dialogue into an hour and twenty-eight minutes that simultaneously fly by and also feel like five hours. I won’t lie to you, the whole reason I watched this movie in the first place was because Ron Livingston is in it and I’m a big Swingers fan. Sadly, Ron’s character does a mocking AAVE greeting where he uses the N-word as a white man, so this is officially the worst thing Ron’s done, and trust me this is not the last time we will be talking about a movie my boy Ron was in, this horrible misstep notwithstanding. I know I’ve painted a great picture of this movie, so I won’t keep you waiting. Let’s get into it.
We start with a shot of cows, because why not. The movie is a reference to that old slut-shaming idiom “why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free” which I’m glad isn’t commonly said anymore. They really milk that phrase for all it’s worth (see what I did there?). Sarah (Bridgette L. Wilson) and David (Jerry O’Connell) are driving and Sarah gives David a “deadline” to propose marriage to her. Sarah is flying away to New York for work from their home in LA and David needs to think about his ultimatum. We cut to David’s friend Tyler (Ron Livingston) calling on the phone saying he’s getting married (and using the N-word in a very cringey scene…c’mon Ron, I like you, this is bad) and we cut back to the airport with David and Sarah because I guess this is a flashback? She wants him to think about this but not to consult his friend Mike (Ryan Reynolds), a narcissistic womanizer, because obviously Mike will tell him to remain a playa. In another flashback, or flash present or whatever, as Mike does a Buffalo Bill dicktuck, Jonesy (Bill Bellamy) shows up to take him to happy hour. Back at the airport, Sarah insists their relationship needs to mean something. This movie’s editing is a mess.
Later, Jonesy, Mike and David are playing basketball and discussing David’s situation. David feels insecure about getting married because he doesn’t believe he has slept with enough women. Jonesy thinks it’s nonsense but Mike thinks he needs to sleep with as many women as possible because Mike is a caricature. In NYC, Sarah seeks reassurance from a friend that she is doing the right thing giving David an ultimatum and her friend thinks she is making the right move. Back in LA at the bar, Mike tries convincing David that if he and Sarah have an inevitable love, it wouldn’t hurt to delay it to try and sleep with other women. David tells a story he has kept secret about a woman he met on vacation that he felt an immediate connection with. His hair and outfits in these flashback scenes are just atrocious, crimes against humanity. I don’t even know what kind of hair this is. It’s like a bad Caesar with a mullet back.
David tells the guys he kept correspondence with the girl, but it turns out she was an eleven-year-old who looked older and law enforcement cracked down on David. Jonesy and Mike tell him to never tell that story again, which, yeah, he really shouldn’t. And if he does, he should lie and say he has a different hairstyle. Regardless, David is still obsessed with the idea of being mesmerized by a stranger so easily and worries about marrying Sarah. Sarah calls David and there’s clear tension between them as David insinuates this ultimatum is ruining his life, which wow, that must make Sarah feel amazing. Who wouldn’t want to commit to this winner?!?
While watching Sumo wrestling, Mike tells David to start going clubbing with him and Jonesy to trawl for strange women. There’s like a voiceover about how women aren’t cows or something? They really try and run this “buying the cow, milk for free” metaphor into the ground. Mike has some even worse outfits than flashback David yet still goes home with a pretty woman. David is ready to leave but Jonesy puts it into perspective that at least David has someone to miss, and he needs to get over his hang-up that others may be out there and just marry Sarah who is amazing and makes him happy. Jonesy makes a misogynistic analogy about how the perfect woman is a faceless mystery because perfection is unattainable or some shit, which would sound deeper if he didn’t say “bitch” so often. Jonesy goes home and David goes for chili.
Lo and behold, David is struck by a woman’s mesmerizing beauty in the restaurant just as he had been that underage girl on vacation. She leaves while David is peeing and he chases after her car but is unsuccessful. He places a personal ad looking for his possible soul mate after finding a discarded personal ad section from this mesmerizing woman. Mike lays awake while his latest paramour sleeps peacefully. He calls Tyler to ask him advice on knowing when he has met the woman he should marry. No idea what he’s up to here because he’s the player of the story, right? Tyler makes Mike his best man before hanging up.
Sarah’s boss in NYC hits on her and she is receptive and flirts back. Sarah has dinner with Tyler who discusses the fact that he was anti-marriage until he got sick of playing the field and met the right woman. He tells Sarah that David hasn’t played the field enough which is probably why he is reluctant to propose. Sarah calls David and leaves him a message saying she understands that he needs to see other women to decide and David gets in his head about it. He goes out to the bar to tell Mike about his situation and Mike says he’s not wasting his time by sleeping with multiple women, that he has a strategy and he is a sportsman trying to land a big catch (in a fishing analogy) and, yeah, it’s exactly as shitty as you assume. He pops off with some pickup artist bullshit and we get another voiceover about how the milk ain’t free and you gotta pay for it. So naturally the guys go to a strip club.
Sarah’s boss asks her out again and she tells him she’s involved with someone back in LA and still needs to think things over. At the strip club, the stripper Amy (Alyssa Milano) shit-talks Mike and compliments David because I guess they know her. Jonesy does a Barry White voice to appear sexier. Okay, turns out she went to school with David and must know Mike from back then too. Oh, and Amy and David dated. Mike and Jonesy talk about how Mike could have stolen Amy from David back in the day and Jonesy basically calls him a dickhead.
At the restaurant from before, David just misses seeing the woman again, but also finds another personal ad discarded with his ad circled showing that she has read it. He goes home to check his messages and there’s some cringy jokes about the people calling him, but no message from the woman. He does hallucinate that she left him a message and is in his apartment confessing her adoration for him. He awakens drooling like a puddle and answers a call from Mike who woke up in a stranger’s bedroom and thinks he’s in love but doesn’t remember anything from the night before. He sees the woman he slept with’s picture in a frame with a guy and tells David he’s ready to propose to whoever she is, but when she comes back, oh shit it’s not the girl from the picture, it’s a guy! Wha-wha-what?!
The guy calls Mike “lover” and “pretty boy” and insinuates that they slept together the night before. Mike runs into the bathroom and turns on the bath water and sits rocking back and forth on the ground trying to come to terms with the fact that he’s gay and doesn’t hear the guy outside tell him that Mike actually slept with the girl in the picture and this guy’s just her roommate. She like went out to get something or something, and she really likes Mike too. I don’t know, but I know this is a subplot; that Mike thinks he’s gay and is missing out on his soulmate because it’s some kind of miscommunication. Mike tries to escape naked out the window and horrifies a woman below before leaving on the fire escape and a child sees Mike’s ass. He tells the kid he’s Spiderman and asks for his shirt to cover up, and a man sees this and goes to shoot him to defend the child from what he assumes is a child molester. The kid hugs “Spiderman” and says he’s his “special friend” and obviously this leads to Mike getting shot at and running from the cops and police dogs. Once again, this is supposed to be a normal dude comedy movie.
Mike just runs half nude through a strange house and there’s a really weird scene here I don’t want to describe but Laura (Alicia Rickter), the woman Mike is crazy about, sees him running and is mad at herself for being fooled again into thinking she slept with a good guy, misunderstanding why he is running away. Back at David’s, he is calling back all the women that could possibly be the one and makes dates with them all, but his only intention is to try and find the one woman. The responders show up to the spot he set the dates for, and he lies saying he’s not David but Sarah’s friend shows up identifying him as David and soon all of the women realize he was trying to meet like a hundred women at once under the guise of finding a soul mate. They beat the shit out of David. Turns out, the soul mate woman does show up but can’t get help from the staff due to David getting beat and she leaves. Wow what bad timing!
Sarah’s friend tells David she understands what he’s going through and implies that Sarah is seeing someone else. He calls but her coworker answers and blurts out that she’s on a date with her boss. The coworker ridicules David and he has a really cold look on his face, or at least as emotional as Jerry O’Connell is going to get.
At Sarah’s date, her boss discusses being happily married. Oh, turns out he just wants her to work for him full time. He offers her a job in New York working in her dream field and tells her sometimes thing’s aren’t supposed to be simple. Back at Mike’s apartment, he is ignoring his friends’ calls and keeps having dreams about the guy from the apartment. He watches some informational videos about questioning your sexuality. He asks Jonesy and David to meet him at a gay bar. Mike gives David his little black book but doesn’t tell the guys what’s up.
David attempts to go on a bunch of dates with women in the black book but they’re all disastrous non-starts in a montage while Mike tries on thongs and stuff. David calls Sarah and they argue because she wants to move to New York for this job and David is just a frustrated mess. She flies back to give David a chance to talk her out of moving, but when she arrives at the airport, he tells her he can’t ask her to marry him without doing…something…first and takes off to meet with Tyler in New York.
Turns out the woman Tyler is marrying is the young lady that David got in trouble for writing to a decade earlier! What the fuck! Tyler doesn’t know this but David does (after seeing the Save the Date) and there’s tension before Julie (Erinn Bartlett), Tyler’s fiancé, arrives. Julie apparently doesn’t recognize David. He sits mesmerized by her over dinner and it’s pretty blatant, I don’t know how Tyler doesn’t see this. Julie tells the story of David from her perspective. Turns out, he was grotesque and creepy and she was terrified so she took his address. She confesses she threw David’s address away but her sister Katie who’s two years younger essentially catfished David the whole time, and David actually never had real correspondence with who he thought was his weird underage soulmate, but this underage girl’s sister pretending to be her. So, David had been clinging to this weird connection he had with an eleven-year-old but it was actually with a nine-year-old. This is such a weird and terrible movie. Now David’s even grosser!
David leaves suddenly congratulating the two as he realizes that there is no such thing as “the one” and there won’t be a sign to tell him who to spend his life with, and he makes some dumb fake deep analogy about fate or something, I don’t know.
Later, Tyler and Julie get married and all the gang are in attendance. David talks to Sarah and it turns out she found her mesmerizing soulmate in New York much in the same way all the others in this movie did. Amy seems to be David’s wedding date. I don’t know what point she serves in this movie aside from getting a paycheck. She wants to dance but he doesn’t. Like really, there was no purpose for this character, especially for probably (at the time) the most-known actress in the film
Julie lets David know her younger sister is in attendance at the wedding and wants them to meet. David runs away realizing what this means. He tries calling for a cab to escape and Mike goes to make a toast to the newlyweds. He comes out as a “raging homosexual” to the shock of the wedding party. There’s a really weird and not so cool treatment of homosexuality in this movie. Also, you don’t make someone’s wedding day about you! Mike’s announcement tried to steal the show! That’s just basic human decency smh.
Julie goes to get her sister Katie (Scarlett Chovrat) and WOULDN’T YOU KNOW IT? The woman David thinks is his soulmate is the nine year old he wrote sexually charged letters to! This movie is such a disaster. Mike sees Katie getting in the cab he called and chases after. He runs into a tree because he’s a dummy. He throws himself on the cab to stop it from going further and he and Katie have their charged soulmate moment. Ick. They go to a hospital to treat his internal bleeding and I guess they end up together without ever revealing the creepy shit David did when she was a kid.
As the newlyweds go to leave, Mike is hooking up with Amy in the wedding limo. Oh yeah, I forgot Amy convinced Mike he wasn’t gay. Tyler says like thought you were gay dude and Mike says like what of it. And that’s our movie.
So, you may be wondering what purpose this movie serves. I guess it was to get these people a paycheck, because I absolutely refuse to believe that this film was a labor of love. The director ended up going on to make Van Wilder with Reynolds (his first breakout role) the next year, so I guess that’s cool, not like it’s a classic or anything. It’s always good to see Ron Livingston work but the racial slur used in a mocking AAVE phrase just ruins his performance. Plus, there’s all the misogyny and weird pedophile jokes. This movie doesn’t even have a critical score on Rotten Tomatoes! Doesn’t even have a number! So yeah, I guess this one isn’t worth watching. My synopsis may be confusing, but the movie itself was confusing. If you do feel brave enough to sit through this one, or if you’re a Reynolds superfan who has somehow avoided this one, it is currently streaming on Starz. Don’t say I didn’t warn ya.