The Heartbreak Kid Details

[Highly rated reviewer]

The Heartbreak Kid

At 40 Eddie Cantrow (Stiller) has never been ready to take the plunge and get married but when he meets Lila (Akerman) they get serious fast and to prevent her from being moved away for work they marry, only six weeks after meeting.

Once on their honeymoon Eddie is soon irritated by Lila and while she is locked in their room with a bad case of sunburn he meets Miranda (Monaghan), they hit it off and Eddie begins to think he’s made a terrible mistake.

Okay so perhaps I didn’t do it any favours by watching There’s Something About Mary for the umpteenth time the night before seeing it but by any standards The Heartbreak Kid is an abysmally bad film. The jokes, and I use the word extremely loosely, are so staggeringly bad that The Heartbreak Kid comes in as the second comedy in recent memory that has not managed to raise even the slightest of chuckles from me (the other one being the dreaded Date Movie).

The Heartbreak Kid shouldn’t be this bad, it’s not as if there’s not talented people involved. Ben Stiller did sterling work for the Farrelly’s in Mary, channelling his established persona into a true everyman performance that engaged you immediately with the character and the film. Here he seems bored and lost, trotting out the same stale performance he’s given many times before. The easy way with the material is gone and Eddie, who is meant to be our point of identification, comes off as a truly nasty character. We’re supposed to be rooting for him while he’s running around with Michelle Monaghan, but can’t, because he’s just as one dimensional and irritating as she is.

Akerman, bless her, tries hard and she’s a good sport about the abuse the Farrellys put her through but her character is hideously underwritten, turning on a dime from a dreamgirl to a shrew we’re supposed to hate. Again this doesn’t work, we don’t believe the character shift and while the film places all the blame for Lila and Eddie’s problems squarely on her we the audience are sat there thinking ‘hold on… he’s a dick, why isn’t any of this his fault?’

If I’ve never previously held forth about my love of Michelle Monaghan let me now redress that. Shane Black turned up a real find when he cast her in the still underrated Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang and though she had a terribly thin part as Tom Cruise’s arm candy in M:I:III she managed to make something of it. Here there is literally nothing to work that magic on. The Farrellys can’t even come up with a new character so they essentially give Akerman’s character in the first half of the film brown hair and have Monaghan play her. Lazy doesn’t even begin to describe this writing. We’re meant to fall in love with Miranda, as Eddie does, but so vacant is she that even though Monaghan is cute as a button it just doesn’t work.

Among the rest of the supporting cast Jerry Stiller and Daily Show alum Rob Corrdry do what they can with one-joke parts that drag on far too long but there is surely a special place in Hell’s comedy club reserved for Carlos Mencia. Mencia’s stereotypical performance as what appears to be the only member of staff at the resort where most of the film takes place suggests that he has discovered whatever the direct inverse of ‘funny’ is and elected to do that. His catchphrase ‘Screw off, I’m joking’ is perhaps one of the least funny things ever captured at 24 frames per second and, lucky us; we get to enjoy it 4 times.

It beggars belief that the same men who were responsible not only for There’s Something About Mary but also Dumb and Dumber and Kingpin made this cinematic abortion. It shouldn’t be challenging for them and yet every single set piece falls embarrassingly flat. It all comes back, though, to a dreadful screenplay. It’s clear where the script wants our sympathies to fall but it is executed so badly that we end up on exactly the opposite side, particularly in the shockingly bad last reel when, clearly, we should be wanting Stiller and Monaghan to get it together and yet I can’t have been the only one who thought the guy with the baseball bat was in the right.

The Heartbreak Kid is about as badly botched as I think it is possible for a comedy to be. The defining mark of quality for a comedy surely has to be the laugh count so let me just restate The Heartbreak Kid’s for the record… 0.

Stiller has lost his sparkle!

I'm a Stiller fan, but I have to say he has lost his spark in this movie. I think the chemistry just wasn't there between him and his two leading ladies. Certainly not one of his better films. The plot is a bit OTT, but nothing Stiller couldn't have pulled off, had he looked like his heart was in it. Mediocrely entertaining, but nothing to write home about,that's for sure.