It was only a matter of time before some producer or director somewhere decided to make Liv Tyler-she of the pouting lips, statuesque frame and ingenue status-the object of every man's desire. In the intermittently hilarious black comedy One Night at McCool's, producer Michael Douglas and first-time director Harald Zwart have done just that. As the beautiful-but-scheming Jewel, who wants her dream house and will stop at nothing to get it, Tyler manages to ruin the lives of three obsessed admirers (who, to be honest, deserve it) while actually taking the lives of a couple more.

A Rashomon-like tale that constantly turns back in on itself, the film details the interlocking stories of three men whose lives are forever altered by the one night mentioned in the title. First there's the feckless bartender Randy (Matt Dillon), content to sling beer at McCool's until the night that he meets her. In the space of a couple of hours, he rescues Jewel from a seemingly dangerous situation with her boyfriend, finds out from her that he's being set up to be robbed by them, watches helplessly as Jewel shoots the boyfriend, lies to a cop (John Goodman), saying that he shot the guy in self-defense, and then watches in wonder as Jewel moves in with him. All of this, just because Jewel took a shine to Randy's fixer-upper of a house. Randy sees it as a grand love, of course.

Meanwhile, John Goodman's Detective Dehling goes into a swoon the moment he spots Jewel, seeing her as a dead-ringer for his late wife. In short order he's using every excuse he can find to visit Randy and Jewel and soon he convinces himself that he's her rescuing angel, there to save her from what he sees as Randy's violent ways. It's a credit to the movie that, at the very moment that it dawns on the audience that he's stalking her, Dehling says in a voiceover, "You would almost think that I was stalking her, if my motives had not been so good." The irony being, of course, that most stalkers probably think the same thing...

Stooge number three is Randy's cousin Carl (Paul Reiser in the film's bravest performance), a slimy lawyer with a penchant for whips and leather, who happens to be present at McCool's the night of Jewel's appearance. Soon he's extending an invitation to Randy and Jewel to come over for a barbecue so he can attempt to seduce her. His fate provides one of the film's most hilarious moments, and I won't spoil it by even hinting at what it may be.

The plot-which is much more comedically detailed and convoluted than I've been able to convey here-derives much of its humour from the fact that similar events are related very differently by the three weasels involved. Randy is telling his story to the hitman he's hired to kill Jewel (played as a greasy, pompadoured, bingo-playing sleazeball by a momentarily unrecognizable Michael Douglas), while Dehling is confessing to his priest and Carl his analyst. Their wildly divergent accounts of the events in question both propel the film's sometimes questionable sense of comedy (we have There's Something About Mary to thank for making stalking funny...) and serve as biting reminders of just how deluded and self-justifying men can get when obsessed with a woman.

Despite the de rigeur forays into some exceedingly un-P.C. themes that the filmmakers don't quite pull off, One Night at McCool's is a clever piece of work, made bright by director Zwart's candy-coloured design and photography. If only the filmmakers had seen fit to give us a fourth point of view-that of Jewel herself. Now this would be very funny indeed.