Heart? Broken.
posted on Wednesday, January 16, 2008 in Movie Reviews
It’s been almost ten years since Ben Stiller and the Farrelly brothers unleashed There’s Something About Mary on an unsuspecting world. One would hope that their reunification would yield something as funny and entertaining as their first collaboration, but it doesn’t. The Heartbreak Kid, while at times funny, almost feels like a relic of comedic cinema, and ultimately delivers an underwhelming experience. The film is a loose remake of the 1972 film of the same name. Eddie is a forty year old man with commitment issues who meets Lila, a seemingly perfect woman. Pressured by his father and his best friend (and buoyed by his ex-fiancée’s recent wedding), he marries her after just six weeks. While on their honeymoon, Lila turns out to be a complete disaster, and Eddie starts reconsidering his hasty marriage when he meets Miranda, who truly seems to be the perfect on for him.
The main problem of the film is that it exists in a weird nexus between classic comedy and the twisted Farrelly sense of humor. The original film was written by comedy legend Neil Simon, and the film is peppered with some really Simonesque touches. This doesn’t really mix well with the Farrelly shock-comedy formula, and when this film goes absurd and gross-out, it completely falls apart. If they had stuck to just one style of comedy, the story might have worked better overall. The way they’ve done it, it’s too crude to be as heartwarming as they seem to want it to be, and too classically sweet to be as darkly funny as they’d like. The big victims of this contradiction are the storytelling and the overall development of characters. It’s just weak.
The movie is funny at times, but it isn’t really anything we’ve seen before. Comedy’s sort of moved on from where the Farrelly brothers seem to stay. With the likes of Judd Apatow and the rest his crew raising the bar for comedy, this kind of thing isn’t really cutting it.
Whatever real laughs there are can mostly be attributed to the cast. Ben Stiller has always been funny, and no matter how horrible, it’s always good fun to see him get hurt. When he starts to go frantic, you might get nostalgic for some of his earlier roles. Malin Akerman is sexy and hilarious, even when everything goes terribly wrong. Michelle Monaghan isn’t really given all that much to do in terms of acting, but she at least makes for a very convincing dream girl. The funniest roles belong to the minor supporting cast. Jerry Stiller proves that his age will never get in the way of his funny, and Rob Corddry will make you laugh with every line he delivers.
Taking all things into account, The Heartbreak Kid isn’t especially bad, but it isn’t especially good, either. It just feels flat, as if it’s just missing that little something special that made us laugh so hard ten years ago. It feels like there isn’t enough heart in it, that they’re mostly going through the motions of making a “funny” movie, and no longer care about capturing the energy that they once had. What we’ve been left with is just a shell of a Farrelly-Stiller collaboration, empty inside, and barely worth watching.
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