Heartbreakers

If there is a more mean-spirited, less appealing comedy than “Heartbreakers” out there in movie land these days, I can’t name it. The movie, which apparently took three people to write, establishes several characters, all of whom are venal and dislikable in the extreme, and then tries to have us love them because they are so adorable. In movies, as in life, you can’t have your cake and eat it too. “Heartbreakers” doesn’t have the courage to craft itself as a truly cynical movie about love (think “The Opposite of Sex” from Don Roos), and it doesn’t have the skill to make us find these people all that funny, nor believe it when they undergo the inevitable romantic conversions. Max (Weaver) and Page (Hewitt) are a mother and daughter con team who have perfected the following scam: Max finds wealthy older men and gets them to marry her, then sexy Page seduces the new husband just as Max walks in. Voila! A divorce and a nice fat cash settlement follow. The picture opens with the scam being run on Dean (Liotta), whose business, it appears, is a car theft and chop shop operation.

When Max and Page have a run-in with the IRS, though, they head to Florida for one final score, the big one that will let them quit the game. After some bickering (and the movie derives a lot of its “humor” from the bickering between mother and daughter), they pick William Tensey, a billionaire tobacco magnate, as their next target. Tensey is played by Gene Hackman, who gives what is really the movie’s only funny performance. Complications ensue, though, when Dean, having decided he really does love Max, tracks her down in Florida. Meanwhile, Page meets Jack (played by Jason Lee, last seen in “Almost Famous”), a laid back bar owner and prototypical nice guy. Naturally, just as her mother had feared, Page is struck by true love, which can be bad for business when you are a con artist. The movie grinds its way along with Max trying to marry Tensey, and Page battling her feelings for Jack, while Dean plans revenge for having been scammed.

Unfortunately, “Heartbreakers” never manages to lose its rather shrill, strained tone. Everyone in it seems to be trying too hard to be funny, to punch up every line of the mediocre script. Perhaps if they had relaxed more the outcome would have been better. As it is, we feel like the movie is being shoved down our throats. Weaver, who is certainly capable of comedy, just looks plain uncomfortable throughout much of the picture. (For no good reason, they also make her adopt a phony Russian accent, which sounds terrible.) Hewitt, who in this picture is the best ad for push up bras since Julia Roberts in “Erin Brockovich,” doesn’t fare much better with the thin material. Liotta, playing a comic variation on his character from “Goodfellas,” looks like he wandered in from some other picture. “Heartbreakers” is woefully short on real laughs. It struggles to make its nasty characters lovable, but they wind up neither funny nor appealing. The movie does boast the second movie joke in recent memory about a penis being broken off of a statue (the other, if you are interested, was in the equally painful “The Wedding Planner”). If that’s your idea of hilarity, be my guest. (3/31/2001)