A near horrendous attempt at romantic comedy, The Heartbreak Kid goes too far in its reach for laughs that it ends up soaring off the end of a cliff and falling to a fiery death. The plot focuses on the premise that Eddie (Ben Stiller), an aging bachelor, marries too soon into a new relationship and doesn’t discover how horrible she is until the honeymoon. There are a few very brief moments that could show potential, but the far-out nature of most of the film is simply not funny, and Lila (Malin Ackerman) is a very unpleasant character.
At first Lila seems nice enough, but then she marries Eddie and on their honeymoon is suddenly revealed to be a vulgar disaster of a wife. She gets sun burned after refusing to put on sun-screen, and then screams at Eddie like it's his fault, the comments about her mother insinuate that Lila will soon become wrinkled and fat, she is only interested in kinky and mildly violent sex, and she is revealed to be a former cocaine addict. Having such an annoying lead lady is just not fun to watch, and it doesn’t help that we don’t particularly feel sympathetic for Eddie, a character who’s essentially quite shallow, and while Lila being the lunatic she is, he isn’t the most pleasant person either.
The only real character I liked in this movie was Miranda (Michelle Monaghan), a girl who’s genuinely cute and sweet and deserves better than Eddie. She meets him at the resort that he and Lila are honeymooning at, and the two slowly seem to be falling for each other. Her brother’s (Danny McBride) suspicion of Eddie is quite funny, but mainly because McBride is a comedic guy. Unfortunately for the movie, the romance between Eddie and Miranda is not only far from perfect, but it is constantly interrupted by things we don’t want to see on screen, such as a sex-driven horse, peeing on jellyfish stings, or Lila’s character at all.
While the Farrelly brothers have made some funny movies over the years, and they struck comedic gold with There’s Something About Mary, this movie is a major disappointment. I would expect more not only from these filmmakers, but from Hollywood as a whole. The comedy here is not funny, the sex scenes not sexy, and the lead characters are not likeable at all.