Heartbreakers
Let me come right out and say it, Heartbreakers is an aptly title feature that manages to take an intriguing premise and some of the finest actors working in film today and turn it into something barley ready for a world premiere on HBO. Disappointing on every level, it’s as if someone set out to make the most mediocre film ever made. And boy, how he succeeded.
Things start out promisingly enough as our mother and daughter con woman team of Sigourney Weaver and Jennifer Love-Hewitt prepare to relieve chop shop owner Ray Liotta of his cash by getting Mom to marry him and daughter to seduce and destroy him. Things go according to plan, but after the fleecing, daughter wants to go solo. Mom can’t have that, so through a series of plot contrivances, the pair end up in Florida where they hope to run off with one big final score.
Only there are some complications. Mom’s not thrilled about Florida (her reasoning being that people are more suspicious the richer they are), and their prospects are so slim, they are stuck with a tobacco CEO (Gene Hackman) who’s as old as his family’s money. Oh, and daughter seems to be falling in love with the sweet bartender (Jason Lee) she wants to con.
The contrivances of the plot are easy to look until about an hour into the film and then it’s just unbearable how bungled the whole enterprise gets. It’s hard to get into without ruining the ending, but what were these people thinking? How do you justify getting rid of the only thing that’s funny in the whole movie 45 minutes before it ends? I don’t understand it.
I can safely say that it wasn’t the fault of the cast. Weaver, who is still an undeniable knockout, and Hackman (the emphasis on HACK, as in hacking cough!) bring a great sense of fun as well as crack comic timing to the film. They are up for anything here. Check out the otherwise abysmal Russian restaurant scene for proof. Hewitt brings the same game spirit here, but is forced to hide behind a tough girl persona for the majority of the movie. Jason Lee is, look into my eyes here, WASTED in the stupid role of the stupid bartender. With nothing to do here except look lovingly at Hewitt from time to time, he’s supposed to come off as romantic, but he just looks dumb. Ditto Anne Bancroft, who was smart enough to appear unbilled, and Nora Dunn. Why cast great people in roles where they don’t have a chance to make an impact? It’s beyond me. Ray Liotta’s performance seemed to sum up the general attitude everyone involved behind the scenes here: in the beginning, he attacks his role with a childlike gleam in his eye, but by the final thirty minutes, that gleam has been replaced by a morbid, vacuous stare.
The most annoying part of this whole enterprise is that a lot of the film’s problems could have been solved with some script revision. Three writers are credited here, but not one of them could solve the basic problem of how exactly to end this sorted mess. There are about three endings here that I can count. And none of the situations or the characters’ reactions to them seem plausible: it’s all dictated by script, which is a damn shame since the man who directed this, David Mirkin, worked on The Simpsons, and directed the fun and fluffy Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion. It’s enough to make you wonder if he was suffering from amnesia during the shoot.
I really wanted to like this film and as I was watching it, I kept trying to justify all the reasons I should think this was a funny and entertaining movie, but I kept coming back to that dead look in Ray Liotta’s eyes that kept saying what I could not in a crowded theatre: Get this over with already!!! In the end, Heartbreakers isn’t a terrible movie, but a missed opportunity for all involved and a painful lesson in how, despite the best of intentions, good movies sometimes go horribly wrong.