If you're wondering how far Hollywood can push the envelope in this post-There's-Something-About-Mary world, look no further than the first film from former Disney chief Joe Roth's new Revolution Studios.  All of those years producing animated family films must have warped old Joe's mind just a little bit because Tomcats is one raunchy piece of work.  But it's also pretty funny, assuming you can handle jokes about, among other things, diseased testicles, bestiality and dominatrix grandmothers.  Tomcats knows what its target audience is, goes all out to entertain it and, in that respect, the film should be a success.

The film tries rather hard to alienate everyone who isn't in that target demographic almost immediately.  Tomcats' opening credits feature a group of cartoon cats ogling, chasing and pretty much humping a busty bunch of animated felines while, as if that wasn't already a frat-boy wet dream, a new Offspring song plays in the background.  You barely notice the cartoon fade to reality, where, seven years ago, the first member of a group of pussyhounds called "Tomcats" is about to be married.  One boner joke later, the unmarried 'Cats decide to kick money into a pot which will be given to the last group member to get hitched.

Flash to present-day Las Vegas, where fat 'Cat Steve (Horatio Sanz, Saturday Night Live) is about to marry a girl named Tricia (Jaime Pressly, Poor White Trash), leaving only Michael (Jerry O'Connell, Mission to Mars) and Kyle (Jake Busey, Enemy of the State) as the group's remaining bachelors.  When Michael blows $51,000 playing craps, his life is threatened by a mobster (played by the truly unthreatening Bill Maher) who gives the lad just 30 days to come up with the money.

Hence the crux of Tomcats story – Michael hatches a plan to make Kyle fall in love with one of his many former conquests, leaving him the winner of the kitty, which, thanks to some wise investing, has grown to nearly $500,000 (the movie must have taken place before the NASDAQ "correction").  He strikes a deal with Natalie (Shannon Elizabeth, Scary Movie), an undercover vice cop and the only girl Kyle thinks he could ever even think of marrying, and the two begin to spend time together on recon missions to prepare their strategy.  In a completely surprising development, Michael and Natalie end up falling for each other.  Wait, I meant unsurprising.

While the story isn't worth the bar napkin on which it was probably scribbled, Tomcats is full of some clever and disgusting sight gags, and has a few decent recurring jokes involving Michael having all his property repossessed, a possibly gay 'Cat, and Steve trying to catch his wife in bed with other women.  Parodies of M:I-2 and American Beauty fall pretty flat, and Elizabeth, Tomcats' sparkplug, isn't even in the first 20 minutes, and then disappears for 20 right before the denouement.  On the plus side, the finale includes a very funny performance from Garry Marshall.  O'Connell, a pretty likeable actor, does a capable job with what seems like a script even Brendan Fraser would have rejected (he even plays a cartoonist, like Fraser's Monkeybone character).

Tomcats was written and directed by See Spot Run scribe Gregory Poirier, who isn't quite in the same league as the brothers Wayans or Farrelly.  But it looks like everybody had a blast making it (especially judging from the closing credit outtakes, which were the best non-Jackie Chan clips I've seen in a while), and that makes it more fun to watch.

1:35 –

for strong sexual content (nudity) including dialogue, and for language