The Heartbreak Kid
Directed by Bobby Farrelly & Peter Farrelly
Starring Ben Stiller, Michelle Monaghan, Jerry Stiller
Rated R

“I couldn’t believe that she knew my name. Some of my best friends didn’t know my name.” — Ben Stiller, There’s Something About Mary

“Do you ever get so bored, you just stare at your balls?” — Martin Starr, Knocked Up

Remember a time where the Farrelly brothers were on a roll with such classics like There’s Something About Mary, Dumb and Dumber, Me, Myself, and Irene, and Shallow Hal? (Okay, maybe not Shallow Hal.) I would like to remember those days, because now all they are releasing are turds in the wind. Since There’s Something About Mary, the duo went on to do some extraordinary things. They made Chris Rock an animated pussy, conjoined Greg Kinnear and Matt Damon (and I still can’t say his name without a straight face) — and I can’t even begin telling you how wrong that was — and even made a movie that just happened to come at the right time when the Red Sox won the World Series and they had it star Jimmy Fallon and called it Fever Pitch. They even redeemed themselves in my eyes at least when they produced one of the funniest comedies of the last few years, The Ringer. So when the Farrellys have the chance to make a comeback in the director’s chair, and even get Ben Stiller and his dad to star in the movie, guess what happens?

They screw it up.

Think of The Heartbreak Kid as the hooker on Mermaid Avenue. It’s been fucked with so many times that it lost count.

Yes, I’m afraid to say that The Heartbreak Kid isn’t good. There is about an hour’s break throughout the movie where they don’t even throw a joke at us. It switches from a comedy, to a drama, to a comedy again, to a romantic film, to a drama, and then to a comedy in just a matter of an hour and forty minutes. I even prayed to god and his Mexican brother Bobby Lee that there would be a redeeming part in this movie. While there is a joke every once in a while, The Heartbreak Kid is a boring mess added on to the top of the list of Hollywood remakes (one in which I’d never even heard of until last week). How could you go wrong with a movie where Ben Stiller plays the greatest role in the last five years, with Michelle Monaghan‘s beauty, and Jerry Stiller as the most awesomest dad ever, who invites his kid to Vegas to have sex with some of these hot steaming brunettes?

Ben Stiller plays Eddie Cantrow, some normal guy who just hasn’t found the right women yet. He’s at the right place at the right time that he sees a lady get her purse stolen. He tries going after it, but the robber gets the better of Eddie. The woman’s name is Lila, and they fall in love so fast that he proposes to her. They get married within six weeks of their meeting, just so Lila doesn’t have to go to some country that I forget. They go to Mexico for their honeymoon, where Eddie meets the beautiful and single Miranda Mona (Monaghan). Lila gets sun poisoning, so she is stuck in a room for the entire vacation. While she is stuck in the bathroom, Eddie becomes friends with Miranda, and believes that Miranda just might be the one. The love between Eddie and Lila, however, goes by faster than Lindsay Lohan’s twenty grams of coke.

The Heartbreak Kid has a colorful cast of characters. Ben Stiller plays your everyday guy who just can’t find his true love, which doesn’t really bother me. He’s played it before, so now he should know how to play it by the rules. He’s pretty good in this movie, which kind of saves it from me giving it only one star. Michelle Monaghan, with her beauty and acting talents, amazes me once again. Her role here isn’t as great as the one she played in Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, but you try and come up with one that was, and I’ll give you a shiny nickel. Also starring here is Jerry Stiller, who saves the movie from itself. He’s not in it for too much, but when he is, his role screams out, “HEY! STOP LOOKING AT THE PRETTIER AND YOUNGER VERSION OF ME, AND START LOOKING AT ME, DAMMIT!” But when there are three roles, there has to be a bad one. Actually, I won’t even say it was a bad role. The star that played the role didn’t have much to work with. Malin Akerman plays Lila, the girl Ben Stiller marries. She’s just about as crazy as a damn fool on a motorcycle going 85 on I-95, but we don’t find this out until thirty minutes into the movie.

…Which brings me to my next point. BECAUSE we don’t get to know these characters once they are introduced to us is why the movie fails so badly, so miserably. We meet Lila’s character, and just out of the blue”¦ she has a deviated septum”¦ Now”¦ Farrelly (both of you, preferably)”¦ where in the hell did you tell us that? Did I miss it while I got up to take a piss? No, because I didn’t get up to take a piss. I piss before the movie so I get my money’s worth. You tell us a freaking hour into the movie that she has a deviated septum from being a junkie. And sure, you guys who hate me because I thought Wristcutters was an emo movie will think that I never knew that this character should have secrets that Stiller’s character never knew. Actually, I did, and I predicted it when I saw the commercial for the first time during Knocked Up. It just bugs me that they do this for the sole reason of getting laughs. Maybe one of you Dan Fogler fans start snorting, get yourself a deviated septum, and I’ll laugh at you guys. Farrelly brothers are known for their raunchy humor and their jokes about drugs, but I only laugh at the funny ones, not the ones that you take seriously.

That little scene just ruined the entire movie for me, but even getting rid of that wouldn’t do this movie justice. It’s just not funny. It seems like the usual romantic comedy, and each and every one of you knows how much I hate them, even if you don’t know me. We could have at least gotten a joke like the infamous hair-gel scene in There’s Something About Mary, but even that would be too much. They don’t take full advantage of the R rating that the MPAA gave them. In fact, none of the jokes were actually raunchy. I’ve seen raunchier stuff in a Rugrats cartoon than this. Basically, The Heartbreak Kid was a waste of film and time for the people who watched it, the people who starred in it, and the people who worked on it. It’s killing me to say this, but for the first time ever, I regret being a fan of these guys. The Stillers and Monaghan are still cool in my book, but the Farrellys, for all I care, their career is already dead to me.

And by the end of the day, I will be seeing them in hell. Until then, you keep watching There’s Something About Mary and laugh.

P.S. Did anyone notice that they didn’t even think about advertising Carlos Mencia in the previews? Ah, of course, no one would come to see it. They would have to be a Dee-Dee-Dee to even think about doing that.

** out of ****