Good Advice

Director: Steve Rash

Maybe it’s me, but when I think advice columnist, I don’t exactly picture Charlie Sheen but then again, Denise Richards wouldn’t be that high on my list either. However, Sheen goes from Wall Street to offering Good Advice literally in this entertaining but slight comedy of mistaken identity when the philandering Ryan Turner (Charlie Sheen) loses his job and license as a stock broker after an insider tip proves wrong and ends up on the couch of his Paris Hilton-like mindless girlfriend Cindy Styne (Denise Richards). Although Cindy looks like she can barely spell her own name and finds husbands giving their wives plastic surgery for anniversaries romantic, she inexplicably works at the Chelsea Journal as an advice columnist with her only preparation being that she owns a blue iBook. Realizing that she’s now the breadwinner in her relationship and that she doesn’t want to waste her beauty on someone not fulfilling her ambition to make her a kept uptown wife, she jets off to Brazil with her latest meal ticket. Soon Turner finds a solution to keep the money flowing by pretending Cindy is down with a severe illness and must do her job at home as he decides to become Dear Cindy (except without the Tootsie or Doubtfire drag). While his first pieces of advice may have even shocked Cindy herself and he’s threatened by the brainy and beautiful editor Page Hensen (the underused Angie Harmon) that she’ll give up on the column, Turner begins buying every woman’s magazine in sight and with the help of his friends, the plastic surgeon Dr. Sherman (Jon Lovitz—not exactly Mr. Sensitivity himself) and his unsuspecting bimbo wife Cathy (Rosanna Arquette), Dear Cindy becomes the toast of New York.

Enjoyable fantasy that-- minus a few of the plastic surgery and sex jokes-- may have made a charming vehicle for a 60’s Day and Hudson comedy. In the end, the nearly unbearable first twenty minutes seem like a distant memory given the considerably more convincing chemistry that Sheen has with Harmon (shocking that he didn't have it with his former wife) as he begins finding himself falling for the editor, which makes his lie as the devoted boyfriend to Cindy the fashionista even trickier. Mindless fun-- Good Advice should definitely appeal to fans of Sheen’s Two and a Half Men.