When Will I Be Loved was a revelation in that I wouldn't have believed it possible not to enjoy or to be able to recommend a film wherein Neve Campbell spends much of her screen time naked and/or scantily clad, much of it having sex. Sex with a young man an old man and a blonde woman - the latter a protracted and steamy lesbian scene that makes her threesome with Matt Dillon and Denise Richards in Wild Things look like something from Nick at Night. Even more surprising is the film was written by Bugsy scribe James Toback, whose Two Girls and a Guy contained some truly hot and erotic scenes.

The biggest problem with this film is that it felt like a short that was stretched into a feature by padding it with a good half hours worth of superfluous and uninteresting filler. The plot itself, might have been satisfying if Neve Campbell's character had been developed enough to actually root for, not to mention that the circumstances of it's resolution required heroic amounts of suspended disbelief. The plot mechanics that allow Campbell to turn the tables in order to cash-in on a cool million were so far beyond plausibility, that it was just absurd. Then again maybe I missed something as often as I rolled my eyes in the last 15 minutes.

The film starts with the aforementioned half hour of filler, which pretty much follow Fred Weller (a street hustler with several thousand ridiculous irons in the fire) and his girlfriend (Campbell) who wanders the streets of New York. Much of this stroll takes the form as a rather loose job interview with a drama teacher played by Toback himself, that is continually interrupted as they stop to talk to everyone from Mike Tyson (who claims that he's not really Mike Tyson but rather Buck from Minnesota) to a number of men who Campbell claims to know, but is actually just attracted-to and seeking digits from. She also bumps into actress Lori Singer, who actually does confess to being Lori Singer, yet nothing the least bit interesting or even related to the advancement of the plot transpires in any of this.

Meanwhile her shiftless weasel of a boyfriend (the hyper-verbal Fred Weller) has a similarly aimless trek through the city where he bumps into the many shady characters that he has some sort of scam going with. Sadly we learn very little about either character during this protracted prologue other than there isn't anything particularly interesting or likable about either of them. Campbell is certainly the brave thing here - masturbating with the shower massage, and spreading her legs whenever the wind blows through the window of her sprawling loft apartment. The apartment itself is a gift from her wealthy parents (Karen Allen and Barry Primus) given to her in hopes that she might lose her crummy boyfriend and begin to develop some sort of life goals and ambitions. She even carries on a speaker-phone conversation with her mother about the virtues of her hard and stiff mattress as she is having sex with the blonde woman. All of which is sufficiently racy, but ultimately in the context of the film is as sterile and hollow as Michael Jackson's bedroom since the trial began.

The plot itself involves a pretty straight forward arrangement that Weller has somehow cooked-up wherein a filthy rich Italian media mogul (Dominic Chianese) is willing to pay Campbell and Weller one hundred grand in exchange for Campbell's willingness to provide the rich man with a challenging mistress and fulfilling the obligations concomitant to said position. We soon learn that never say Neve Campbell possesses the street smarts to dupe both of these men, up the ante to a million and handily dispose of the both of them. That was kind of a spoiler huh? I don't feel too guilty however, because Campbell made this payoff the gist of the conversation on the late-night circuit. Amusingly enough, on Letterman she spoke of her many nude scenes as something the role demanded in order for her to fully flesh out this complicated character. Sorry Neve, no sale. Personally I think that she wanted to get as much mileage as possible out of the finely tuned physique she acquired while shooting The Company.