Heartbreakers

Fucking Suzanne. She made all of the employees at First American Video go to her stupid fucking Oscar party, and we all had to get dressed up. She told me that I would get fired if I wore my tuxedo t-shirt instead of a real tie, or didn't show up at all. That was fine with me, but Mrs. Filthy wanted to show off her prom dress that she redid with the Bedazzler so we had to go.

Dipshit Suzanne was drunk before they gave out the stupid "Best Sound" or whatever award. She started acting out scenes from her favorite movies. When she got to Top Gun, she sat on my lap and said, "Take me to bed or lose me forever!" and then planted her fat-ass lips on my mouth. It was fucking horrible. She had dried onion dip on her cheek and smelled like hairspray.

I pushed her off of me and grabbed Mrs. Filthy so we could get the fuck out of there. I felt like killing somebody. Mostly because dipshit Suzanne is so disgusting, but also because (and if anybody says anything about this to Mrs. Filthy, I'll cut his dick off) I got a little boner when she kissed me. Not that I liked it or anything, but Jesus, she was sitting right on my lap, and it was right after they showed Julia Roberts at the Oscars. I was determined to never go back to First American Video, but I think I have to or else Mrs. Filthy will know something is up.

None of this has anything to do with the movie I'm reviewing, except that this experience, along with seeing Heartbreakers, make this just about the worst weekend of my life.

Sigourney Weaver and Jennifer Love Hewitt are con-artists who use their dirty pillows to swindle men out of their money. Weaver gets rich men to marry her, and Hewitt, Weaver's daughter, seduces them immediately afterward. Weaver divorces the men and the two sneaky broads take off with a huge settlement.

Hewitt is getting restless, though, and she wants to go out on her own. Weaver doesn't want her to lose her, so she engineers a scam to make it look like they've lost all their money to the IRS. Hewitt reluctantly joins her mother for one last big swindle, in Palm Beach.

Their target is Gene Hackman, a rich tobacco tycoon who (ha ha) smokes a lot. While the two work out the scam, Hewitt falls for a cardboard cut-out of a human being, played by Jason Lee. Weaver feels her daughter slipping away from her, and she tries desperately to show that all men are evil, to keep Hewitt from falling in love.

The grand, stupid conceit of the movie is that the ladies never sleep with the men they are swindling. Keeping their purity while they walk around with showing off their tits and asses is supposed to provoke big laughs. But there are fewer funny jokes than exposed nipples in the movie, which makes it a big, fat two-hour waste of time, which could be better spent jerking off to naked pictures of Hewitt in Maxim magazine.

We're supposed to like these women, as the writers make painfully clear. But they never bother to give us anything to like about them. They are far below average con-artists, and when they try to get sweet and sentimental, it's like watching a group of office gals throw a bachelorette party for their fat coworker. It's cliched and cloying and nobody wants to be there to witness it.

A good movie about grifters, like say, "Grifters," should be smarter than the audience. You shouldn't have the whole scam figured out before the opening credits are done. One scheme, repeated over and over, involves the women getting free meals by putting broken glass on their half-eaten plates of food and then squawking about it. From my own personal experience, eating in places where you are actually likely to find a piece of glass in your food, this would never work. Nobody is stupid enough to be fooled by a scam a third-grader could dream up. The writers of this pile of wormy shit can't even be bothered to come up with one decent con, except the one where they make millions of people spend eight of their hard-earned dollars to sit in uncomfortable seats and wait for this gonorrhea-infected cock of a movie to end.

The problem seems to be that nobody can decide what this movie is. It's not quite a good con picture, it's not quite a romantic comedy, and it's not quite a story about a girl growing up and breaking away from her family. Instead, it's a bunch of crap stolen from other movies and re-worked in a half-assed way.

There are so many bad performances in this movie that it's almost impossible to single out one. But somebody must have told Jason Lee that there's going to be an Oscar for "Best Performance of an Ignorant, Dull Nobody" next year. He struggles to make sure there's nothing likable or even remotely interesting about his nice-guy love-interest for Hewitt. At first Hewitt hates him because he's not rich. Then he might be rich, so she tries to seduce him. Then he's not rich, and suddenly Hewitt is interested. Finally, he turns out to be rich. Through this muddled mess of plot, Lee never manages to say or do one single interesting thing. Yet somehow we're supposed to believe that Hewitt is going to give up her love of fancy cars and expensive shoes to settle down in a dumpy Palm Beach bar with Lee and his hairy friends.

The one moderately enjoyable aspect of the movie is Ray Liotta. He usually plays creepy mobsters, so being a creepy car chopper isn't much of a stretch for him. Out of all the assholes in this movie, he seemed to be the only one actually trying to deliver his lines with some sense of comic timing. Despite the best efforts of the writers to make him a ridiculous cliché (What? A sleazy Italian from New Jersey, you say? Well, shit, sign me up!), he actually gets a couple of laughs, just because he seems to be the only one able to join the audience in seeing how fucked up and stupid Weaver and Hewitt are.

I'm sure the appeal of this movie was supposed to be Jennifer Love Hewitt's juicy tits. I won't even bother complaining about the fact that we're only allowed to see the top half of them, but I will say that teenage America's lust over her misshapen body is perplexing. It looks like she had a lot of plastic surgery done before she was a well-paid star, and the hack she got to do it really fucked up bad. If you do happen to see this movie, against my advice, take a look at her stomach. I think Sigourney Weaver implanted a funny-looking alien in there.

This summer, the writers in Hollywood are probably going to go on strike. But I think all the editors have been striking for a while and not telling anybody, because nobody seems capable of making a movie last less than two hours. Since when is a goofy comedy supposed to last more than an hour and twenty minutes? This premise is too thin to be entertaining for fifteen minutes, so by the end of two hours, I was actually looking forward to going home and finally cleaning up all the vomit out of the corner of the garage where I threw up a couple weeks ago.

Two Fingers for Heartbreakers and the lazy fuckers who wrote and directed it. David Mirkin, try to remember what it's like to be funny by watching old tapes of The Simpsons.