Best Men: [DVD] [1998] by Dean Cain

Tamra Davis' Best Men must have seemed a better idea on paper than it ends up being in practice, in spite of some snappy dialogue and good central performances. A group of male friends meet Jesse (Luke Wilson) out of prison to take him to his wedding to Hope (Drew Barrymore); along the way, their friend David pops into the bank for some money and turns out to be the Shakespeare-spouting bandit Hamlet. Suddenly all of them are his unwilling accessories in a hostage situation with David's sheriff father and murderous FBI men besieging them and a crowd cheering their every move. Each of the young men has a trauma and it is not only David who gets a soliloquy: gay Green Beret Buzz (Dean Cain) has an extended period of bonding with one of the hostages, demented Vietnam vet Gonzo (Brad Dourif). The eventual action sequences are curiously perfunctory and uninteresting and the obsessive FBI man, Hoover, has little motivation. This is a likable film which goes nowhere, but has quite a lot of gentle charm along the way to its tragic ending. On the DVD: the DVD is presented in a widescreen video aspect of 2.35:1 and has Dolby surround sound; the special features are a slightly self-congratulatory making of featurette and the film's theatrical trailer. --Roz Kaveney