It takes chutzpah of a particularly flagrant sort to update the Neil Simon/Elaine May classic, THE HEARTBREAK KID. The Farrelly Brothers obviously pack that sort of gumption, taking the droll but deadly humor of the original and rethinking it with their trademark penchant for slapstick and silliness. It may not have the same wry weltschmertz as the original, but that’s not an insurmountable obstacle.
The premise is the same. Sort of. Eddie (Ben Stiller), 40, marriage-phobic, and humiliated at his ex-fiance’s wedding, succumbs to the nagging of his father (Jerry Stiller, Ben’s actual father) and friends, about his high standards and determines to lower them in order to finally settle down. So when Lila (Malin Akerman) appears on Valentine’s Day, it seems like kismet, and not much of a step down, if any at all. They meet cute when he tries to stop the guy who swiped her purse. She’s beautiful, wants to take things slow, and works as an environmental researcher. After a six-week courtship, they tie the knot and take off on a car trip from San Francisco to Cabo San Lucas for their honeymoon. And that’s when things get dicey, starting with her penchant for singing at the top of her lungs to every song on the car radio, including “Muskrat Love,” to their first carnal coupling that leaves Eddie dazed, confused, and more than a little scared.
She gets a massive sunburn on their first day, leaving Eddie to fend for himself and that’s when he meets Miranda (Michelle Monaghan), who turns out to be the woman of his dreams. Too bad he’s on his honeymoon. Events conspire to keep him from being able to confess the situation right away, making it all but impossible from doing it later.
The original followed the same arc, except it was sweet Jeannie Berlin, clingy and annoying, as the wife with the short shelf-life. Lila is more semi-psychotic, with the revelations about her true nature making her not just dim, she hasn’t quite figured out Eddie’s full name, but possibly lethal. It makes Eddie’s new infatuation with Miranda not so much the product of a fickle heart as an act of self-preservation. In a nice twist from the original, Miranda is not the shiksa princess that was Cybill Shepherd, but is instead a post-modern southern belle with a wicked sense of fun that is the perfect match for Eddie.
This is without a doubt the funniest that Ben Stiller has been on screen in years. Toned down several octaves and relying on his impeccable instincts as a straight man, he makes THE HEARTBREAK KID, if not a sterling effort, at least one that delivers some genuine belly laughs. Instead of preening, Stiller reacts to the chaos around him with quiet panic and the soul of a nebbish. It makes him, and everyone else that much better, from Rob Corddry’s whipped married man longing to be free, to Lila’s insouciant dark side revealed by her bit by bit with the killer smile of the unwitting sociopath, to the use of a chili pepper as an offensive weapon. Even the Farrelly’s are restrained compared to some of their earlier work, with only a few pratfalls this time out, more as an homage than anything else. As for gross-out humor, they work unexpected wonders using the physiological problems of Lila’s deviated septum, with Eddie’s “Honey, you have a little tri-tip coming out of your nose” an instant classic. If Carlos Mencia as Uncle Tito, the fixer at the Cabo hotel, is a tired cliche, and the jellyfish joke wobbles and flops as much as the cnidaria itself on dry land, one can only ponder the humor that might have been and move on. The Farrally’s do, taking the plot to barely credible but wildly funny extremes as Eddie follows his heart with increasingly impressive reserves of both resolve and desperation.
THE HEARTBREAK KID does its job, which is to make an audience laugh. If it lacks the same constant ratio of laughs to screentime as the original, it still delivers a bracingly puckish take on the pleasures and perils of love at first sight
at first sight
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