The Heartbreak Kid
LATEST FILMS
REVIEWED BY DNA SMITH Special to Florida Weekly.............

King Features

Running Time: 115 minutes
MPAA rating: R

GRADE: D

The Farrelly Brothers, the guys who brought us "There's Something About Mary" and "Kingpin," are back with their latest gross-out comedy, "The Heartbreak Kid." And after suffering through nearly two hours with this hack job, I kinda wished they'd stayed away. "The Heartbreak Kid" has very few laughs, no sympathetic or fully realized characters and an idiotic plot.

Ben Stiller stars as ... Ben Stiller. Oh sure, his character's name is Eddie, but it doesn't matter, it's just Stiller playing the same guy he's played in virtually every movie he's made in the past 10 years.

"Eddie" is a single, 40-year-old owner of a sporting-goods store who helps a young blonde, Lila (Malin Akerman), who has her purse snatched. The two embark on a whirlwind romance, and after a few weeks of dating, she gets word that she's being sent to Holland to do environmental research for two years.

However, she wouldn't be pressured to go had she been married. So, to keep Lila in town, Eddie proposes marriage. She accepts. They drive to Mexico for the honeymoon, where Eddie discovers that Lila isn't the girl he thought she was. Not only does she have the annoying habit of knowing every word to every song ever recorded, she's also a recovering coke addict who is thousands of dollars in debt and suffers from an ailment I can't print in a family newspaper.

While in Mexico, Eddie meets Miranda (Michelle Monaghan), a perfectly vanilla personality. Eddie falls in love with Miranda and now has to figure out a way to dump Lila so he can hook up with another woman he barely knows.

Throw in a bunch of lame jokes and stereotypes about Mexicans, a few gross crotch jokes, and that's the movie. And if that isn't enough to tell you how much this movie sucks, chew on this: Carlos Mencia's in it. Honesty, how bad does a movie have to be that Horatio Sanz won't sign on to play the token Mexican in the fake comedy moustache?

(c) 2007 King Features Synd., Inc.