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Amos Lassen wrote on 02/23/2011:

“The Next Best Thing”
Poor Madonna
Amos Lassen
“The Next Best Thing” has a lot going for it. Rupert Everett is a charming and gay leading man, the script is based on a very cute idea—a straight woman and a gay man decide to have a child. The problem is the leading lady, Evita herself, Madonna, just can’t act. As Evita Peron she won a Golden Globe but she has not acted decently in any movie she has made besides that one role. I was all ready to be entertained by this film and I was entertained by the scenes without Madonna.
The plot in a very concise way goes like this—two best friends, a gay male (Everett) and a straight female (Madonna) spend the night together, she gets pregnant, they have a son whom they raise together and then she meets a straight man she wants to marry and the whole mess gets messier.
The premise for the movie is good but the script is just awful—there is no continuity, the characters are completely underdeveloped and Everett comes out looking as the bad guy. The child is somewhere and we hate everyone in the movie. The bad guy is the bad guy, the good gay guy is the bad guy, the child is the bad guy, and the boyfriend is the bad guy and so on and on. Madonna is obnoxious. For someone who cries all the time she looks beautiful. She plays a woman let down by one man too many and when she sleeps with her gay fried, she gets pregnant. And then the movie slides toward a mudslide. Now I love Madonna—when she sings and she still is looking good but she is not an actress—wait—she is an actress—a lousy one. A stellar cast with Madonna and Everett, Benjamin Bratt and Lynn Redgrave should make a stellar movie. Instead the made a real stinker. Maybe that is why it moved so fast—so we would not see how bad it is. In fact, it is so bad that it is good. Madonna’s vapidity mesmerized me, Benjamin Bratt astounded me at how bad he was, Rupert Everett—I love you but you were terrible and Lynn Redgrave had a few seconds on the screen and was lost.
I rarely give anything a bad review—if something is bad, I choose not to write about it and I would not have written about this movie if I thought it was really bad. But this is not just really bad—it is politically too correct and pitifully awful. Rupert Everett, I am so sorry.

franco wrote on 03/13/2002:

One of those movies that makes you annoyed that you sat through to the end. I kept hoping it would redeem itselfn or that it would pick up at least a little, but turned out to be very cliched. And, since it seems that the middle part of the movie drags on to death, the end was a painful diappointment.

Pee-eew!

BigManOut.com wrote on 06/12/2001:

The Next Best Thing Stars Rupert Everett as a tank top wearing Gay
gardener, and Madonna as a spiritual girl Yoga instructor. The two
best friends share more than a few bottles of wine one night, and
nine months later the salesclerks at Baby Gap know them by name.
During a three-minute montage we see how easy and fun it is for a
Straight woman and Gay man to raise a child from birth to around
seven. By the end of this radio friendly montage music, available on
the original soundtrack, Madonna meets a cute Straight man and the
Gay guy becomes as forgotten as Madonna's Erotica CD.

The fight for custody, that you can see coming as you put the DVD in
the player, arrives: bringing with it a courtroom revelation that…
damn-it, it's too late for me! I've seen this Lifetime Television for
women reject, but there's still hope for you! Save yourself the cost of
renting this and the 108-minute running time --108 minutes I'll never
get back! Madonna & Rupert are friends in real life and you'd think
there'd be chemistry, or they thought there'd be chemistry. Sadly
there wasn't a beaker or Bunsen burner to be found. I've had a bit of
a crush on Rupert Everett since My Best Friend's Wedding, but not
even seeing him work a pair of boxer-briefs was enough to save this
flick.

Kevin Williams, BigManOut.com