Movie Review The Heartbreak Kid

The Heartbreak Kid (2007)

Directed by Peter and Bobby Farrelly 

Written by Peter Farrelly, Bobby Farrelly, Scot Armstrong, Leslie Dixon, Kevin Barnett

Starring Ben Stiller, Malin Akerman, Michelle Monaghan, Jerry Stiller, Rob Cordry, Danny McBride

Release Date October 5th, 2007 

Published October 4th, 2007 

Ben Stiller has the astonishing talent to remain as funny and likable in bad movies as he is in good movies. Night at the Museum, Meet The Fockers, Envy, all not so great movies and all movies where Stiller outshined the material provided to him. Stiller is once again in better than the movie mode in the Farrelly Brothers comedy The Heartbreak Kid. This sorta-romantic comedy, a remake of the 1972 Elaine may-Neil Simon teaming, has a terrific idea at its center and Stiller in fine form. Unfortunately directors Peter and Bobby Farrelly can't help but succumb to their worst instincts in a vain attempt to recapture past glory.

Eddie (Stiller) is 40 years old and never married. He was engaged for 5 years, but as we meet him in The Heartbreak Kid, he is attending his ex-fiance's wedding. Both Eddie's dad (Jerry Stiller) and his best pal Mac (Rob Corddry) give him no end of crap for not settling down when he had the chance. Thus when Eddie meets Lila (Malin Akerman) he rushes things a little bit.

Eddie and Lila fall into a relationship not long after he attempts to foil a bad guy who stole her purse. A whirlwind courtship leads to the hasty decision to get married and a disaster on the horizon. Taking their honeymoon in Cabo San Lucas, Eddie quickly realizes that Lila is a little off. She sings along with every song on the radio, she's horrible at math, and she's desperately in debt. She's also not very bright, thus why she is almost immediately laid up in the hotel room with a bad sunburn.

The time alone allows Eddie to meet Miranda (Michelle Monaghan), a beautiful women's lacrosse coach vacationing with her family. The two spark quickly and after spending a day together drinking and soaking in the local culture,  Eddie realizes he is in love. Now, he has to figure out a way to break it to Lila that they are not working out and make sure he has won Miranda's heart.

The set up for The Heartbreak Kid is solid, this is a terrific premise. Unfortunately, the Farrelly Brothers, back behind the camera for the first time since 2005's Fever Pitch, can't resist a return to their basest instincts. Fever Pitch was a sweet, good hearted romantic comedy that played straighter than any previous Farrelly's comedy. The Heartbreak Kid is a throwback to the less interesting Stuck On You, Shallow Hal, Me Myself and Irene days.

Those films distilled the essence of the Farrelly's oeuvre down to the lowest common denominator. Each has its moments, but for the most part each is a lesser and lesser version of the Farrelly's one true classic There's Something About Mary. The Heartbreak Kid is the palest imitation of all; featuring Stiller in the earnest, frustrated good guy role he played so well in Mary.

Sadly, The Heartbreak Kid fails to capture what made Mary such a great comedy. The combination of heart and humor in There's Something About Mary is a near perfect combination of good hearted romance and lowbrow, genitalia based humor. It's a combo nearly impossible to pull off and The Heartbreak Kid doesn't even come close.

Disgusting for the sake of being disgusting, slapstick for the sake of slapstick, The Heartbreak Kid constantly steps on the more interesting aspects of Eddie's romantic dilemma by dropping in unnecessarily crude humor. Do we really need Carlos Mencia as a porn loving, sex offending, hotel manager? Do we need Jerry Stiller grossing out everyone in earshot with his many horrifying sexual innuendos?

Did we need to see Ben Stiller getting peed on or a visual gag about women's privates that may be the lowest joke of any movie in 2007? I certainly don't think so. Not when Ben Stiller, Malin Akerman and Michelle Monaghan are doing such great work creating a comically tense love triangle. The crudity only serves to distract and get in the way.

Ben Stiller gets better and better each time out. In fact, Stiller has never seemed more comfortable onscreen as he does in The Heartbreak Kid. Granted, he's played the flustered good guy for more than a decade but really, you can finally see him losing his many tics and affectations and becoming comfortable being himself on screen. This newfound comfort only serves to turn this already funny actor into a more charming and interesting screen presence.

Stiller's work clearly has a good effect on co-star Malin Akerman who does much of the heavy lifting in the broad comic moments. Akerman is a great beauty who gives herself over to broad comedy in the most unexpected ways. Not everything about her performance works, but you have to respect her bravery and willingness to do anything that was asked of her.

Michelle Monaghan is the perfect romantic foil for Stiller. The two have tremendous chemistry and the romance between them was more than interesting enough to make The Heartbreak Kid work as a romantic comedy. It's unfortunate that Peter and Bobby Farrelly didn't trust their stars enough to back off, just a little, on the lowbrow stuff.

The potential is there for a terrific romantic comedy in The Heartbreak Kid. It's undone by writer-directors desperate for faded glory. Peter and Bobby Farrelly have seen diminishing returns on each of their films since There's Something About Mary. Only Fever Pitch betrayed an attitude that they really didn't care about mimicking their past success.

Reteaming with Ben Stiller however, the Farrelly's sensed an opportunity to regain their A-list status and went for broke trying to recreate something that just can't be captured a second time. Certainly not with such desperate pandering as that which breaks The Heartbreak Kid.

Movie Review: Alvin and the Chipmunks Chipwrecked

Alvin and the Chipmunks Chipwrecked (2011) 

Directed by Mike Mitchell

Written by Jonathan Aibel, Glenn

Starring Jason Lee, Justin Long, David Cross, Jenny Slate, Anna Faris, Amy Poehler 

Release Date December 16th, 2011 

Published December 15th, 2011 

As a professional critic I know I shouldn't be biased against any movie but indeed I was biased against "Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked." The first two "Alvin and the Chipmunks" big screen adventures are moronic and terrible movies that flashed pretty colors and loud music in order to distract children and parents into thinking they'd gotten their money's worth.

"Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked" on the other hand has a richness and thoughtfulness that was lacking in the first two movies. In no way is 'Chipwrecked' a great movie but by the lowered bar of the first two films it's a "Citizen Kane" level effort.

"Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked" opens on a cruise ship where a family vacation is, of course, upended by Alvin's hijinks. Dave (Jason Lee) makes the mistake of leaving Alvin alone in their state room and he leads a break out of the room that takes him to the casino and the Chipettes to the dance floor for a dance off against some Jersey Shore babes.

The ship scenes are very reminiscent of all the things wrong with the first two 'Alvin' movies and my heart sank for about 10 minutes until Alvin took flight on a kite with Simon, Theordore, Brittany, Eleanor, and Jeanette hanging on the tale end. The kite carries the chipmunks off of the cruise ship and off-course to a lost little island.

Dave gives chase after the kids on a hang glider and is joined by his music industry rival Ian (David Cross) who gets caught up attempting to stop Dave from going after the kids. Ian is now a mascot for the cruise line and spends most of the movie dressed as a giant pelican.

In my favorite part of "Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked" former SNL bit player and "Bored to Death" actress Jenny Slate plays Zoe, a castaway on the island. Slate's wacked out Zoe has a running gag about sports balls, ala Tom Hanks in "Cast Away," that somehow got a laugh from me every time the movie brought it back.

Will kids get a reference to "Cast Away?" Probably not; but the wacky bits that Slate does with the balls, including naming them, are expansive enough to get laughs no matter whether you get the reference. It's also nice to see the creators of 'Chipwrecked' throw moms and dads a bone.

"Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked" is not a great movie; it doesn't rise to the level of great family movies like "The Muppets" or "Rango," but the fact that the makers of 'Chipwrecked' worked hard enough to improve this awful series is admirable. Director Mike Mitchell could have coasted on the 'Alvin' brand name and he didn't and I appreciate that.

Unlike the first two films, there is the sense of an actual idea in "Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked." The movie aims to dialogue a little with kids about growing up and learning and earning responsibility. It's a little idea and it's not pursued with much depth but it's one more idea than existed in the first two movies combined.


Movie Review A Haunting in Connecticut

The Haunting in Connecticut (2009) 

Directed by Peter Cornwell 

Written by Adan Simon, Tim Metcalfe

Starring Virginia Madsen, Kyle Gallner, Martin Donovan, Amanda Crew, Elias Koteas 

Release Date March 27th, 2009 

Published March 26th, 2009 

Virginia Madsen is a very talented actress. This assertion on my part is well demonstrated in her Oscar nominated performance in Sideways. However, her name on a marquee inspires the kind of fuzzy, hazy, disconnected state that only Pink Floyd could properly describe. Place her name above the title The Haunting in Connecticut and the combination inspires the kind of yawn that can only be described as jaw breaking.

The Haunting in Connecticut is a movie that commits the cardinal sin of movies. It is not merely bad, it's boring. Not boring merely in the way that one could be doing better things with their time but boring in a way that one is subjected to. As if locked in a room with blank walls and no windows. Gene Siskel put it best 'This movie does not improve upon a blank screen viewed for the same length of time.'

Virginia Madsen is ostensibly the star of The Haunting in Connecticut though one might fairly claim ennui as the film's true marquee element. Madsen plays a country mom to a cancer-addled son, played by Kyle Gallner, who decides to move her family to a suburban home closer to the local hospital. Because the family is not rich she accepts the first home in their price range. This, despite the fact that the home used to be a working funeral home. Poverty is stronger than the darkly ironic, fate tempting idea of moving her dying son into what used to be a funeral parlor.

Dad (Martin Donovan) is forced to stay in the country for work reasons but the rest of the family is coming to the creepy new house. The rest of the family include a toe-headed little brother and a pair of female cousins whose living arrangements are somewhere in the exposition, likely during the onset of my movie-long malaise.

Of course it's not long before the ghosts begin tossing plates and the shrieking musical score begins trying to convince us that all of this is pretty scary. I remain unconvinced. Along the way we greet a few more unhappy clichés including conventional horror movie misdirection where people hear noises that they think are scary but are really cats or birds or relatives.

There is even a brief digression into the child in danger plot as the youngest children are briefly menaced by apparitions. This is thankfully brief but hey if you are going to fly by on cliché you may as well throw them all in there. Clichés at the very least are familiar and even distracting yet somehow even they come off as boring in this film. It's difficult to describe this level of boredom. Imagine Ben Stein in Ferris Bueller mode reading the instruction manual for a ford fiesta. Now take that down a notch and you can imagine something close to what I felt during The Haunting in Connecticut.

This is surprising considering the 'true story' the film is allegedly based on. Al and Carmen Snedeker are a real family who moved into what was a former funeral home in Connecticut back in the mid-80's. After moving in they did indeed report a number of creepy goings on. Their story inspired Ed and Lorraine Warren, the spiritualist con artists who crafted the Amityville Horror legend years earlier, to come and craft an elaborate haunting for the Snedekers.

Not surprisingly, the whole thing became a bestselling book and now this movie. Except that the movie seems to have left out some of the more juicy and entertaining details. Not the ghosts, the bodies allegedly stuffed in the walls, or the alleged séances that may or may not have taken place as a regular bit of funeral home business. That's all in there somewhere, I think, I may have blacked out briefly. 

No. It's the part where Al and Carmen cop to having been raped by apparitions repeatedly over the TWO YEARS they lived in this house. Disturbing on so many levels? Yes, but definitely not boring. This detail was dropped from the movie either in a nod to good taste (Booo) or because writing this detail into the movie would take more effort than the writers were willing to put into it. 

Or, even more likely, it was a commerce over creepiness decision. The film is more bankable as a PG 13 feature not featuring ghostly forced sex. I'm not sure what this says about me but I cannot honestly tell you whether I preferred the boredom or the creeptastic, ungodly alternative left out of the final film. I guess we'll never know. The Haunting in Connecticut is what it is, an utterly mind numbing bore.


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