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Some movies are bad enough to make you say, "One thousand monkeys in a room with one thousand typewriters couldn't come up with an idea this bad." Some movies make you say, "I could eat a bowl of alphabet soup and throw up a better story than this." And then there's Heartbreakers.
The film opens with a wedding between Max (Sigourney Weaver, Galaxy Quest) and Dean (Ray Liotta, Hannibal). Apparently, they're waiting until their wedding night to have sex, so he's as horny as can be. But she falls asleep before he can consummate the marriage, and Dean heads off to his chop shop to tie up some loose ends before they begin their honeymoon. 17 hours after their wedding, Max catches Dean getting oral from his receptionist Page (Jennifer Love Hewitt, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer), files for divorce and walks away with a wad of cash and a brand-new car.
The catch is that Max and Page are really a mother/daughter grifting team (they're the Conners.get it?). This is the thirteenth time the overprotective Max has participated in a phony marriage to squeeze money out of an unsuspecting man, and it's supposed to be the last scam the two pull as a team. Page wants to go out on her own, but she's forced into one last score with her mom when they learn an IRS agent (Anne Bancroft, Keeping the Faith) has seized their bank accounts and expects another $200,000 in just 90 days.
So the two barracudas head for Palm Beach (home of the ignorant, if you remember that little election snafu) and start casing potential marks. Max settles on billionaire William B. Tensy (Gene Hackman, The Replacements), a chain smoker with baked-bean teeth who is on death's doorstep. In the meantime, Page sets her sights on a local bar owner named Jack (Jason Lee, Almost Famous) whose property could be worth millions. He's the nice guy you know the conniving Page will eventually fall for after initially disgusting her.
Heartbreakers is a mean-spirited comedy - a la Whipped - that thinks it can get away with two hours of bile-spewing because its lead characters are intelligent women who only pretend to be a couple of whores. Imagine the picketing if Heartbreakers was about crafty men scamming idiotic women in the same manner. In a good film, they'd end up getting grifted themselves, but the script isn't even that clever. What's more, it's implausible, too. Extravagant weddings happen at the snap of the fingers, and the ending makes as much sense as a New York City cabdriver.
Aside from Lee, who acts circles around Hewitt and still looks embarrassed, everyone else seems like they've had their brains eaten (especially Liotta, for some reason). It's hard to tell where things went wrong, but when all else fails, point at the writer(s). There's three of them here, but two of them penned the amusing Liar Liar. Director David Mirkin is an Emmy winner for The Simpsons, so he gets some slack. Even the music is annoying, with one snippet of a Danny Elfman song played until it's blue in the face.
The best part of the film is when Max has a breakdown at the end, shouting, "I'm a horrible mother. I'm a horrible person." It wouldn't be out of line to shout back "You're a horrible actress," or at least, "You have horrible taste in picking projects" right back at her.
1:58 - PG-13 for sex-related content including dialogue
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