This could have been a really good movie.

As it stands I think it will have to be satisfied with being "okay".

Duets, directed by Bruce Paltrow (yes, her father), is three seperate storylines all rolled into one and all having only one thing in common: karaoke. It is essentially I suppose a road musical of sorts, with each storyline containing two people, thrown together by chance and circumstance, on their way to a big karaoke championship in Omaha, stopping along the way to sing in whatever hotel bar or country-western barn-buster they can find.

One storyline regards Ricky (Huey Lewis, a singer I have always really enjoyed), who plays essentially a career karaoke hustler. He hops from city to city, bar to bar, and then like any hustler pretends to be totally ignorant of the contest he is betting a thousand bucks on ("What is this, karate-okie?"). He meets up with Liz (Gwenyth Paltrow) at her mother's funeral. Lewis happens to be Paltrow's father, only he had no idea, and had never met her before. Paltrow plays a very naive Vegas showgirl who wants to start a relationship with her long-lost father, something he wants no part of. He explains that he is a drifter, and that he has a "performance" he has to get to tomorrow. Liz's grandmother somehow wrangles Ricky into taking his daughter on the road for awhile, playing off his guilt.

Secondly there is the story of Billy (Scott Speedman), a cab driver who owns half a taxi and who walks in on his wife cheating on him with the guy that owns the other half of the taxi. Following that he understandably finds himself drunk in an airport bar when he is approached by Suzi (Maria Bello), who needs a ride out West and who is willing to offer sex for, well, anything. He's an ex-seminary student whose life is currently in the shitter, she's a hussy with lots of dreams who only knows one way to get her way. You get the idea.

The most compelling pairing is the one that, thankfully, the movie focuses on a bit more. This revolves around Todd (Paul Giamatti, a very gifted character actor you will probably instantly recognize but have a hard time placing), who is a traveling salesman who never knows what city he's in and spends most of his time in airport hotels (there is a terrific scene where he walks into a conference room and begins his presentation to the Amusement Park Association, only to half-way through realize he is in the conference room for the Poultry Farmers Association. And that he isn't in Florida, he's in Texas). His family hardly pays him second notice, he hates his job, he hates his suburban life, and he finally goes batshit. He announces to his family that he is "going out to get a pack of cigarettes" (his wife casually makes a passing comment about how he doesn't smoke), finds a bar, gets talked into getting on stage to do a karaoke routine by a pretty young cowgirl who also gives him speed to "melt his fears away", and before you know it he is doing 115 mph down the interstate to nowhere in particular with an earing in one ear and a bottle of pills in the other, a crazed look in his eyes as he tries to find any shithole with a karaoke mic anywhere on route66. He ends up picking up a hitchhiker, Reggie, played by Andre Braugher, who is another very talented actor I remember most from Spike Lee's Get on the Bus. Reggie is an escaped convict who knows nothing else but hitching and robbing. Giamatti can hold a tune fairly well, and he finds a bar that only has karaoke openings for duets, so he convinces Braugher to help him out, and it turns out the con has the voice of an angel. That scene, the duet between Giamatti and Braugher where they sing Otis Redding's "Try a Little Tenderness", is probably alone worth the cost of the rental. The two, complete opposites for all intensive purposes, stike up an unlikely friendship, and I have to say the chemistry between the two actors is definitly one of the better things about this movie.

There were many things I liked about this movie. For one, I found myself on the edge of my seat for the entire movie just desperatly waiting for Huey Lewis to sing some more. He has just such a wonderful voice, that everytime he starts singing, I was held in rapt attention. He's not a bad actor either. In the hustling scenes he does quite well. Admittedly, he falls a bit flat in the emotional scenes between himself and Paltrow, but he can do sly wit very well, which is mostly what this role calls for. Unlike most rock stars turning in a film performance, I didn't find myself grinding my teeth everytime he delivered a line.

A BIG surprise, for me at least, was Gwenyth Paltrow. She is probably the best singer in this picture, and that even includes good 'ole Huey. I would hazard to say that if she never made it in pictures, she could have had a pretty good career as a singer. I was blown away when Huey Lewis walked into a bar he was going to hustle, only to find Paltrow already down there, on stage, singing "Betty Davis Eyes". At the end of the picture, Lewis and Paltrow sing a duet, an old Smokey Robinson tune, that also probably justifies the 3 bucks you'll spend renting the film.

All the actors in this movie, who sing unaided, can hold a tune fairly well. And all the singers in this movie can act perfectly adequatly.

But before you go and think I've given Duets a glowing review (I am by no stretch of the imagination a harsh critic), there are many things about the film I did NOT like.

For one the story between the cab driver and the street-wise hussy seemed practically obligatory, and unfortunalty that's a third of the movie. Also, I thought the chemistry between Huey Lewis and Gwenyth Paltrow was, well, terrible. I can't tell which I blame that on--the fact that Huey Lewis, while a perfectly decent actor, can't hold much of a candle to Gwenyth Paltrow in that arena, or the fact that Gwenyth Paltrow plays a terribly obnoxious and poorly written character. The emotional scenes between the two are really flat and unbelievable, and during the final payoff of that storyline, the duet, you are moved by the music, the emotional charge it is supposed to hold just isn't there.

Furthermore, I found the pace really choppy. It continually tried to counter-act heavy emotional moments with karaoke performances, which was odd to say the least. It would almost have been WORSE for the pacing if the heavy emotional moments were ever actually pulled off, which was rarely if ever the case anyway.

But I think what bothered me most about the movie was that it seemed all building up to one magnificent pay-off, and then kind of fizzled and let the credits roll. The ending of the picture was like something out of a bad TV movie, and I frankly felt a bit betrayed. The storyline regarding Braugher and Giamatti was the most compelling, and the pay-off for it was cheap and over-sentimental. The build-up regarding Huey Lewis and Gwenyth Paltrow never actually worked in the first place, so at least I didn't feel cheated there (their pay-off was the second great musical moment of the film, but had no heart whatsoever). And the storyline between the cab driver and the hussy was just so bad, that even though the pay-off was probably the best done of all three, at that point I could not have cared less, and just kept hoping the director would hand over the mic to Huey. It made a passing attempt to reconcile all three storylines together, but by then it seemed like the film knew it had burnt itself out and decided why bother.

All that said I think I WOULD probably recommend the movie. There really are some TERRIFIC scenes, everytime either Paltrow or Lewis take up the mic, you will be held in rapt attention, and the storyline between Braugher and Giamatti really stole the show. But I kept getting the sense that the movie was a rough draft of something that could have been a really great final product.
So all in all, I'd gie it 2 1/2 stars out of 4.