Directors: Bobby and Peter Farrelly
"The Heartbreak Kid" is something of a return to form for the Farrelly brothers. It combines the same excruciatingly funny blend of toilet humor, political incorrectness and pitch black satire that made their earlier movies like "There's Something About Mary" and "Kingpin" so hugely enjoyable.
Eddie (Ben Stiller) is a moderately successful single man who runs a sportswear store in San Francisco. He literally bumps into the attractive Lila (Malin Akerman) on Valentine's Day and they soon start dating. Feeling under increasing pressure to tie the knot with someone or other, Eddie proposes to Lila after just six weeks and wham, bam, suddenly he's a married man.
The real comedy starts as the newlyweds are driving down to Mexico for their honeymoon. Lila starts singing along to the radio 's and doesn't stop for the entire journey. Stiller's face is a joy to watch as it slowly changes from pleasure, to annoyance, to exasperation, to disbelief. This, after all, is a foretaste of his new life.
Once they reach their tacky holiday resort, Eddie soon finds out that Lila is not the woman he took her for. For one thing, she has a deviated septum caused by an old cocaine habit that makes her snore like a pig and leak liquids. Moreover, she reveals she is thousands of dollars in debt and has no income.
Lila gets badly sunburned after refusing to wear sunscreen and hides out in her room for a couple of days. In this time Eddie meets Miranda (Michelle Mon-aghan) who is on holiday with her extended family. Eddie inevitably falls in love with her and the situation builds up to a convoluted climax that is made worse by several misunderstandings, not least of which is that Miranda and her family mistakenly believe Eddie's wife to have been killed by an axe murderer.
"The Heartbreak Kid" dares to go where few other comedies do. The humor teeters on madness at times, and yet it is painfully funny because it's so viciously astute in its satire of mainstream romantic comedies and the absurd premises underlying them.
There is nothing novel in seeing Ben Stiller humiliate himself but here he raises self-humiliation to a whole new level. The Farrelly brothers are shrewd enough, however, to make us care about their characters and to anchor the ever-escalating absurdity in archetypal Hollywood escapism. All in all, it's heartbreakingly funny with a seriously disturbing undercurrent.
Opens in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania on Nov. 16.
