KEY POINTS:
Herald rating: * * *
Cast: Ben Stiller, Michelle Monaghan, Jerry Stiller
Directors: Peter Farrelly, Bobby Farrelly
Running Time: 117 minutes
Rating: R16 Offensive Language, Drug Use & Sexual Content
Screening: SkyCity, Hoyts and Berkeley Cinemas
Verdict: Gross gags aren't enough to make us
care about this film.
There's Something About Mary was a huge hit for filmmaking brothers Peter and Bobby Farrelly. It was a hysterically funny film that was wonderfully crude and over the top, but also had a heart and featured a sweet love story and likeable characters. It led the way for fellow filmmakers such as Judd Apatow to create irreverent films such as The 40-Year-Old-Virgin and Knocked Up. The Heartbreak Kid is the Farrelly Brothers' ninth film, and, surprisingly, they struggle to pull off what it is that they have until now done best.
The Heartbreak Kid is a remake of a 1972 film some regard as a comedy classic, directed by Elaine May and starring Charles Grodin and Cybill Shepherd. It's a perfectly simple idea about a 40-year-old commitment-phobic bachelor, Eddie, who, encouraged by his 77-year-old father Doc (played by Stiller's father Jerry) and his best friend finally decides to take the plunge and impulsively proposes to his seemingly wonderful new girlfriend Lila (Akerman).
Newly married and travelling down the California Coast to Mexico for their honeymoon, Eddie starts to get the feeling he's made a terrible mistake.
His sweet and caring Lila has turned into a foul-mouthed, sexually aggressive, dizzy psycho with a deviated septum (she's a recovering addict). Taking time out at the resort bar from his new truly awful wife, Eddie meets and falls for the gorgeous and grounded Miranda (Monaghan). Cue the chaos, complicated situations and misunderstandings as Eddie falls in and out of love over the course of three days.
There are some hysterical and memorable moments in this film thanks to outrageous scripting and gross physical gags that shock you into laughter, but that's the least that we'd expect from the Farrelly Brothers.
What's missing is heart, and without it the film falls flat. Running out of steam, particularly in the final act, Stiller, in what seems like a desperate attempt to keep the momentum going, gets more and more hyper.
It isn't engaging emotionally, the film becomes almost cruel rather than coarse, and Stiller makes an unfortunate transition from a normal guy surrounded by eccentrics into a nut himself.