The Other Woman

Who out there does not enjoy a good revenge movie?  You have a loathsome, intolerable individual creating havoc for their own pleasures, and a plot to get even by the person (or persons) whom have been pulled into their black hole of destruction.  It can be a very satisfying feeling to know that justice had been doled out in some fashion, that the victim takes control of the situation and becomes the victor.  The Other Woman (directed by Nick Cassavetes) promises to be such a tale, as a Carly the successful lawyer (Cameron Diaz) finds out that her loving boyfriend is married to the petite and emotional Kate (Leslie Mann), and both of them discover that he is has yet another affair with the young and pretty Amber (Kate Upton).  The three women get together to conspire against the heartless perpetrator, Mark (Nikolai Coster-Waldau).

It may sound like an interesting premise that shows the now empowered women coming out on top, and they do in fact, in a way that could entertain audiences of all ages and genders.  However, that would be a lie.  It is not that.  Well, it is in ways, but not in others.  It is a pizza that has the toppings you like on one side, but once those pieces are eaten (and they always get devoured first) you are left with having to force feed yourself the most undesirable of fixings.  That is how I best see this film.

While not perfect, the first half of the film had me very entertained and laughing on a steady basis, thanks to the performance of the criminally underappreciated talents of Leslie Mann (we will think of her as the crust, because she is the only thing that is consistent on this pizza).  Mann does not just do great line delivery, but gets her full body into the act and does it with a rare verve.  I have often wondered why she has not broken through in Hollywood and headlines movies, because she is so gifted.  My dream would be to see her in a film with Melissa McCarthy, because I just know those two could put on a show like no other.  There is a point in the film where Cameron Diaz gets pushed out a window by Mann, something that could bring a laugh or two, but it was the way in which Mann shoved her out that made it incredible.

Diaz, well she was alright.  She is a very good actress, but not on the same comedic level as Mann.  For the most part she was able to hit her spots and get a laugh, but not nearly as well and was overshadowed in this movie.  Kate Upton… uh… I will get to that in a bit.

The film was proceeding well up until the point of the inclusion of Upton’s character (speak of the devil).  It was not her fault that the film went downhill from there, although she was no up to par with her coworkers, but rather that the film became very sloppy and contrived.  Until now we had a movie (with flaws, as I had mentioned) that had taken a lot of time to develop a relationship between Carly and Kate.  I did appreciate how Cassevetes showed a willingness to forge a semi-proper and semi-coherent development that could bring these women together and bond over the same cheating bastard that had played them both.  From the arrival of Upton (whose character brought nothing to the table), the pace of the film changed, moving everything too fast and losing sight of the tone it had been working to create in the first half.

With probably around thirty minutes left in the film (I don’t know if it was actually thirty minutes, because I didn’t want to be that a-hole who checks his cell phone, but at the same time I did want to be that a-hole because I was bored and I have solitaire on my phone) I had begun begging for the end.  The disintegration of the film was not just around the tone, but the plot, and the actions of the characters.  It seemed that during the writing process Melissa Stack (the writer) said, ‘one of the girls needs to back out now,’ so she decided that one would back out for reasons that did not fit with the established personalities.  And then a few pages later she thought the same thing, and forced another character to do the same, because I guess characters all of a sudden acting differently from how they did previous makes good story telling.

**** Spoiler Alert ****

There was a point in the film where the three girls decide revenge and Amber’s solution is to kick him in the balls.  Not good enough, declares Carly, we need to really get him.  So, what happens next is a series of juvenile pranks that make Mark get large nipples, lose a minimal amount of hair on his head, and poop his pants.  Yep, that is so much more sinister and adult than shoeing him in the nuts.

The pizza could no longer really be called a pizza except for the fact that this diseased and tasteless second half still had a crust under it, which was Leslie Mann who played it well the whole way through.  Her abilities were not enough to save me from the ending, which was supposed to be a brilliant scheme, from feeling like it should have been a mid-nineties movie starring Adam Sandler, David Spade, and Chris Farley.  It was a disaster, and sunk my feelings of the film even lower than they had fallen.

Was it funny?  Yes.  I think people can get a number of laughs from this movie.  Do comedies need to be brilliant?  Nope, not at all.  Any movie, regardless of it being a comedy or not, needs to remember what it is and try to have some consistency through it, and this movie flopped at achieving that goal.  I will end the review adding on that the music in the film did not serve it at all.  It was poorly selected sounds that were overly-generic and made if feel cheaply made.  There were also mini music-montages that showed bonding and self-reflection that were jarring because of the lame choice of soundtrack as well as no proper transition into or out of those moments.  Ack.  Yep, my thoughts.  I am done talking about this film, and I am quite happy about that.

Rating – 2 out of 4 stars

(The rating may seem a bit high for a film that I am speaking so poorly of, but remember… half of this pizza was worth tasting)