Heartbreakers isn’t much of a movie. Its textbook gags can be seen for miles on even the cloudiest of days. As soon as you figure out what is up with Heartbreakers and its main characters, Sigourney Weaver and Jennifer Love Hewitt, it’s impossible not to know how this thing is going to play out.
Heartbreakers at its soul is a bad copy of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. It tries to run the same race with a cast full of people we know, but not even they can save this. How many movies have we seen with gold diggers and their plots and schemes bringing them closer to the cash cow, only in the end to find their hearts are there too? This isn’t the Anna Nicole Smith story; even that biography may have been more entertaining.
Heartbreakers’ twist is that the team is a mother and daughter production. Weaver and Hewitt aren’t entirely bad as con women. Jason Lee playing the mark Hewitt ends up falling for is the only standout. Gene Hackman is on board as a tobacco baby who was born into a fortune and now is ready for the grave. Hackman tries saving the sinking ship but can’t do it alone, and thanks to Ray Liotta the handicap got much higher.
The problem with Heartbreakers is that when it’s most important for the cast to get it together, they just can’t. Most notably Hewitt. The focus falls on her to carry the film to its end and make the giant leap from taking the viewers hate for her character and turning it into a feeling of sympathy. Hewitt can’t pull it off. And on her shoulders alone the film doesn’t fall, but a film that never climaxes just doesn’t feel complete. Heartbreakers leaves you with a sense of untidiness. There are too many holes, too many clichés, and too many bad jokes to make this movie annoying without the ability to finish the task. If you can’t finish, why start?
+ charlie craine
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