Film review "The Heartbreak Kid"

The prospect of a two and a half hour ferry journey from Scotland to Northern Ireland is always made more pleasant because you can relax in the on board cinema and chill out completely with a full length feature film. But you have no choice of the film and on yesterdays crossing a film was shown that the best thing you could say about it was “it passed the time”. “The Heartbreak Kid was so awful that I wondered how it was ever funded.

Perhaps it is just the American sense of humour (or should I say humor) that was so crude, crass and obvious that made me squirm. Anyway the film was supposed to be a “rom com”. But it was totally immoral, somewhat pornographic and based on a man who had a series of totally dysfunctional relationships and destroyed many other peoples lives in the process. Strange to say I hardly found any of it funny at all. It was a tragedy of relationships.

There was no character in the film that you could warm to – except perhaps Marilyn but then she was portrayed as a somewhat naive bit of romantic interest. Marilyn's family were fairly normal and likable but were portrayed as stereotypical red necks – ie rather stupid and boring and trapped in their own little world. The main character, his best friend, and his father were all fairly un-likable numpties. The wife was an air-headed sex maniac, though to be fair she had a deeper side to her character: she had recovered from cocaine addiction and was left with a permanent handicap as a result. But the only impact of this “depth” was as the butt of jokes and she was mostly portrayed as a pathetic foil to the main characters fantasies. Some of the actors in the film I'm told were quite well known but they must have been pretty desperate to take on this script.

Perhaps as a documentary of social realism of dysfunctional lives where serial monogamy is the norm and selfishness is the dominant emotion controlling life choices this was an accurate portrayal but it was not a comedy. It was the sort of thing I would have switched off after ten minutes at home but on a ship with nothing else to do (having left my book in the car deck! ) there was nothing to do but savour the embarrassing awfulness of it all. I was left at the end with the feeling of two hours of my life having been wasted!