I’m serious. The guy is a borderline sociopath. I’m not even talking about his character early in the movie, when he’s just the head of the big, bad chain of Barnes and Noble Fox bookstores. No, I’m talking about later in the movie, when he’s smitten with Meg Ryan’s Kathleen Kelly and both she and we are supposed to realize that hey, this Joe Fox isn’t a bad guy at all.

But he is! Look at what he does. He basically splits himself into two personalities when he’s around Kathleen. When he interacts with her online, he’s her mysterious suitor and when he hangs out with her person, he basically becomes her gay best friend.

Gay Best Friend (GBF) Joe Fox starts giving Kathleen advice on how to deal with online J03_F0X. And that’s when it gets weird. Because Joe Fox is giving advice on how to respond to himself. It gets really weird when J03_F0X asks Kathleen to do something. GBF Joe Fox tells her not to do what online Joe Fox wants her to do to make IRL Joe Fox look like the better man in Kathleen’s eyes OVER HIMSELF! This cutesy Jekyll and Hyde bit goes on for a while.

At the end of the movie, Kathleen agrees to meet her online suitor in Central Park. Instead of a stranger, Joe Fox walks up to her in the park and it’s revealed to her that her cyber-beau has been Joe Fox all along. She says to him, “I wanted it to be you. I wanted it to be you so badly.” I think a better, more realistic ending would have been for her to realize upon seeing Joe that he’s been pulling her strings for months. She lets out an anguished cry, runs to him and beats him senseless while calling him a sicko.