The Heartbreak Kid

Review By: Michael Dance
michaelmdance@gmail.com

There are plenty of things I could complain about, but screw it. The Heartbreak Kid, directed by the Farrelly Brothers of There's Something About Mary, manages to be completely hilarious despite an unlikable lead, an inconsistent tone, the inclusion of the cliched foul-mouthed elderly character, and what seems to be a missing scene. A lot of people will hate this movie for not catering to the standards of good taste, common decency, and Hollywood formula. A lot of people will love it for those same reasons.

Officially, it's a remake of a 1970s movie written by Neil Simon, and the basic plot is the same: Eddie, a bachelor who's not getting any younger (Ben Stiller with graying hair) spontaneously marries a girl named Lila (Malin Akerman), who turns out to have major issues. Realizing his mistake while still on his honeymoon, he falls in love with a sweet single girl, Miranda (Michelle Monaghan) who doesn't know he's married.

It's obviously a good premise for a comedy, but seriously, isn't it kind of mean to lie to your wife while she's helplessly nursing a sunburn to go flirt, and also lie to, another girl who you convince yourself that you're falling in love with after two days? Yes, it's a really big jerk move, and if they had tried to use Stiller's starpower and charm to hide that, it wouldn't have worked. Instead, Stiller plays the character like the liar he is, using his nervous smile not to get the audience to sympathize with him, but to look like even more of a weasel. He's smart enough to know that we're on his side anyway as long as he keeps us laughing -- and as long as he's opposing Lila, the most mind-bogglingly unlikable presence to perhaps ever appear in a movie.

That's not a detriment. As played perfectly by Akerman, she is screechy, annoying, very stupid, violent, grating, and quite possibly pure evil. In most movies, the material wouldn't be funny enough to justify giving scene after scene to a character the audience just plain hates spending time with. But somehow, the Farrelly Brothers do it, infusing each scene with enough manic energy and legitimate laughs to get away with it. Plenty of nudity can never hurt either, although such is Lila's unlikableness that this has got to be the least arousing nudity by a hot girl since Charlize Theron in Monster. And she was wearing a fat suit.

Then there's the relationship between Eddie and Miranda. Remember how Wedding Crashers had a handful of hilarious parts but always came to a screeching halt with the series of bizarrely sappy, irony-free scenes between Owen Wilson and Rachel McAdams? That doesn't happen here - the love story, quite surprisingly, does not get in the way of the humor. Sure, the movie hits all the structural marks -- complications, crisis, period of defeat followed ...