Or, more appropriately titled: Tom Cruise Just Can’t Seem to Get Laid.

There is so much WTF about this movie, it’s hard to even know where to start. I’ll begin by saying that I went into this one with pretty high expectations. I was expecting it to be a classic–released last millennium, in the year 1999, directed by Stanley Kubrick, and starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, Eyes Wide Shut seemed to have all the right ingredients for success.

I was anticipating something along the lines of Requiem For a Dream or American Beauty. What the movie actually delivers is something more akin to Nocturnal Animals–a beautiful, meandering mess of a film with no discernible story to be found. It’s the textbook example of something that is art for the sake of art–in other words, this movie is just trying way too damn hard to be cerebral.

It starts off interesting enough. There’s trouble in paradise for Dr. William and Alice Hartford. Their nine-year marriage has grown stagnant, and shortly after a Christmas party in which both husband and wife are tempted to go astray, Alice confesses to him–under the influence of herb–that she once fantasized about fucking a random seaman she encountered during a family trip to Cape Cod. She even goes so far as to bitterly state that she would have gladly thrown her whole married life away just for a one-night stand with this dude.

As you might expect, Dr. Bill doesn’t take this news very well.

To put things in perspective, Alice and he had just been on the cusp of sexy-times themselves when she decided to dump this baggage on him. Blue-balled, devastated, and also kinda high, he leaves to answer a sudden call from one of his patients. When he arrives on the scene, we discover that his rich elderly patient (seriously, everyone in this movie is like stinking, ridiculously wealthy) has just died. The devoted, grieving daughter who called Dr. Bill on her father’s behalf promptly tries to put the moves on him, claiming that she’s in love with him or something.

And now, in order to cut to the chase and distill this nearly 3-hr trainwreck of a movie down into its most basic “plot” points, I’m going to list all the times Dr. Bill pusses out at getting laid:

1. He turns down his dead patient’s daughter. The excuse: They’ve barely “talked” before.
2. He turns down the world’s most attractive hooker, with whom he has NEVER talked before, after following her back to her apartment. The excuse: His emotionally unfaithful wife called.
3. After getting the secret password from his old med school friend, he attends some kind of Satanic masquerade ball and still fails to get it in–AT AN ORGY. The excuse: I have no fucking idea. He seriously just walks around the whole time watching other people fuck. It’s pathetic, and begs the obvious question: WHY THE HELL EVEN GO THERE IN THE FIRST PLACE??
4. Anyway, once the Satanists find out he’s crashed their sex party, they kick him out, and he goes home and doesn’t fuck his wife. The excuse: Well, she’s kind of a dirty skank, so that’s understandable, I guess.
5. The next day, while returning his masquerade attire, the costume shop owner offers to let him sleep with his teenage nymphomaniac daughter, and he refuses. The excuse: Feigned outrage at the idea.
6. From there, he goes back to his doctor’s office, where he picks up the phone to call that frisky mourning cougar who’d wanted to bone him after her pop died, but when her boyfriend answers, he hangs up. The excuse: No buts about it–he straight-up chickened out.
7. Now in the clutches of what must be the most severe state of sexual frustration known to man, Dr. Bill returns to the apartment of the hooker whom he had turned down earlier in the movie and gets rejected by her hooker roommate, whom he attempts to bone instead of the initial absentee hooker. The excuse: Hooker B informs him that Hooker A has just found out she’s HIV positive, and he’s too much of a pussy to admit to her that he never fucked Hooker A and thereby sabotages his attempts to fuck Hooker B.
8. Understandably hating himself because he clearly has absolutely zero game, he returns home and once again doesn’t fuck his wife, but instead cries like a bitch and admits to her all the weird shit he’s been up to the past 2 days. The excuse: Once again, I’m at a loss here–he must just be terrified of sex.
9. The next morning, he and his wife appear to be on the path of reconciliation, but when she proposes that what they need to do is “Fuck,” he looks at her like a deer in the headlights, and the movie abruptly ends. The conclusion: Dr. Bill, as portrayed by Tom MOTHERFUCKING Cruise, is the most un-fuckable man in the universe.

And there you have it–Eyes Wide Shut in a nutshell. There are some other side-plots happening to draw out this limp-dick story even longer, but they’re every bit as absurd and pointless as the main plot. In the fallout from his Satanic orgy fiasco, Dr. Bill spends a bunch of time trying to track down his former med school friend who’d mysteriously gone missing post-orgy and flashing his medical license like it’s a goddamn police badge. He also investigates the suspicious death of yet another random hooker who’d stepped in to “save” him when he’d been caught party crashing by the chief Satanist. Of course, in the same way that Dr. Bill sucks at getting laid, he similarly sucks at playing detective, so these mysteries go more or less unsolved. He ends up just taking one of the Satanic cultist’s word for it that everything is okay and goes back home with his tail between his legs.

I honestly don’t know what this movie was trying to accomplish. Maybe it was trying to point out that the grass isn’t always greener on the other side. Maybe Kubrick just wanted to see how much ass, bush & titties he could cram into an R-rated movie. But with the distinct lack of action on Dr. Bill’s part, it’s certainly no sexual “odyssey,” and the weak-willed protagonist is no Odysseus.