It's straight downhill from the title, a decorous double entendre referring at once to the heroine's paid escort and to the social occasion to which she is being escorted -- her baby sister's nuptials. The reason for the escort -- to enable the heroine to hold up her head in front of family and former fiancé -- has roots in psychological reality, but the roots run shallow: it would be a very cavalier woman, especially when coughing up a fee of $6000, who would wait till she was aboard the airplane to meet the man she intends to present as her new beau. The gigolo's suitability, at a single glance, as a candidate for serious romance in a frothy comedy is a gauge of the movie's superficiality. While he liberally doles out the sort of platitudes that win him the epithet of "the Yoda of escorts," as well as the sort of sweet nothings that clog arteries and rot teeth ("I think I'd miss you even if we'd never met"), his only evident asset is his surface polish. The B-list principals -- Debra Messing and Dermot Mulroney -- take us no nearer a sense of reality while taking us much farther from a sense of enchantment. Under the willfully blind direction of Clare Kilner, the movie eventually earns some laughs only when it turns earnest. (2005) — Duncan Shepherd
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