In Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, I can fully understand how a lifetime of bitter hate against the poor is undone in one evening, thanks to three life-changing ghosts. However, with Mark Waters’ terrible Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, I find it extremely hard to believe that Matthew McConaughey will change his never-ending pussy-pooling ways, thanks to an extremely similar haunting.
Basically what passed as a romantic comedy before the era of #MeToo, the muscular Matthew plays Connor Mead, a womanizing photographer speaking dialogue totally filled with nothing but the sleaziest of come-ons that, if not being delivered by McConaughey, would easily venture into sexual harassment and, quite possibly, date-rape territory. It seems that he turned out this way because his parents died when he was 7 and left him with elder whore Uncle Wayne (Michael Douglas); do you have ample-enough pity for him yet?
Turns out that this weekend, his grating brother, Paul (the grating Breckin Meyer), is getting married to the irritating Sandra (the irritating Lacey Chabert). Connor shows up already erect and ready to plow through a few drunken bridesmaids, unaware that his childhood sweetheart, Jenny (Jennifer Garner), is there — with whom he had already pumped and dumped — but who cares, because she secretly loves the scamp.
As you can probably imagine, that night he’s visited by three girlfriends, all of whom he attempts multiple times to sleep with, including a 16-year-old Emma Stone. Condoms full of semen drop from the sky at one point, among one of the more grotesque ideas of “romantic” humor in this dreadfully painful flick.
Director Waters, by the way, made other bad films like Mr. Popper’s Penguins, Vampire Academy and Just Like Heaven, wherein a ghostly Reese Witherspoon haunts a forlorn Mark Ruffalo. I haven’t seen it, but judging from the trailer, I’m sure it’s sexually horrific as well. —Louis Fowler