Perhaps in the hands of a more capable, less coasting actor, the character might have played like something more than a toxic spill. Not so with McConaughey's wolfish Connor. He's a quaint relic – not nearly as amusing as co-scripters Jon Lucas and Scott Moore seem to think he is – but harmless enough. As he's aged, Douglas has had some fun with go-big roles such as Wayne, and he appears to have styled this one after Hollywood mogul Robert Evans circa the Seventies: turtleneck and shades and swimming in sex. Several of the supporting players do nice work, especially Stone ( Superbad) as the brace-faced ghost of Connor's first girlfriend she injects a genuine spunkiness into a film that's mostly predictable and deeply cynical. Wayne, the Marley surrogate in this A Christmas Carol reimagining, then ushers Connor through an evening of reflection and reckoning, with the overall aim of nudging him back into the arms of his first love, Jenny (Garner, with negligible screen time). Wayne has been dead for years, but he makes a surprise appearance – to the eyes of Connor alone – at the wedding of Connor's younger brother, Paul (Meyer). Love, he argues, is nothing more than "magical comfort food for the weak and uneducated," a sentiment he lifted from his mentor, Uncle Wayne (Douglas). He dumps last week's conquests via teleconference as he's already undressing his next lay. In the spirit, but not the complexity, of such oil-slick cinematic seducers as Alfie and Roger Dodger's Roger Swanson, celebrity photographer Connor Mead (McConaughey) is a quantity-over-quality kind of guy. Ghosts indeed: This romantic comedy by name alone attempts to make funny – not to mention culturally relevant – the kind of swinging-dick misogyny that went out of fashion years ago.
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