Review of The Next Best Thing

I once watched this on French TV, dubbed. It actually seems like an OK movie in a different language, with different voice actors in a completely foreign tongue. However, seen in its original version the effect is no less that horrifying. Madonna might have done well if the whole thing had been set to music and she was relieved of any obligations of having to speak dialogue. But even bad-movie freaks would be weirded out by how wooden, awkward and cringe-inducing her performance is (to be fair, Tom Ropelewski's dialogue couldn't be made tenable by Meryl Streep). The script smells of desperation; lame dialogue, clumsy time jumps and characters whose motivations seems to come from nowhere. Take out the gay angle which is its only novelty, and you've got something so bad and uninteresting even the PAX channel would reject it. What a sad, sad, sad coda to John Schlesinger's career. And Rupert Everett is so NOT a gardener.