Heartbreakers (2001)

If I Were a Guy, I’d Do You.

Back from my October Horrorthon, I decided that I needed to try to focus on some outstanding requests that I’ve had building up.  The first one I decided to take a look at was from my friend Grabooski.  A while ago, the ‘Booski requested two movies of me that I kept putting off.  I think I was thrown off by how random the two movies seemed to be, and also put off by the fact that they seemed more like chick flicks.  But I’ve never reviewed a movie for her, so I decided to do one of her movies first.  I knew about the movie that I picked because I saw the poster for it and specifically decided not to ever watch it ever.  But that was before I took requests.  Now that I do, I wouldn’t even bother acting like there is something that I wouldn’t watch.  And so, to expand my horizons, I decided to review Heartbreakers, written by Robert Dunn, Paul Guay, and Stephen Mazur, directed by David Mirkin, and starring Sigourney Weaver, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Ray Liotta, Jason Lee, Gene Hackman, Nora Dunn, Anne Bancroft, Sarah Silverman, Zach Galifianakis, Carrie Fisher, and Kevin Nealon.

Max (Sigourney Weaver) and Page Conners (Jennifer Love Hewitt) are a mother-daughter con artist team.  We start our journey with them watching as Max cons small-time Mafioso Dean Cumanno (Ray Liotta) into marrying her, and then getting a divorce on the first day by getting Page to seduce him into cheating on her.  After collecting the settlement, they are confronted by an IRS agent (Anne Bancroft) who informs them that they owe a lot of money in back taxes.  This forces them to head to Palm Beach to find one last big score.  They pick a tobacco baron named William B. Tensy (Gene Hackman), whose addiction to his own product has significantly reduced his time amongst the living.  While Max is working on him, Page finds a bartender named Jack (Jason Lee), who stands to gain a large sum of money if he sells his bar, and Page decides to try to take on this con on her own, behind her mother’s back.

I wouldn’t say Heartbreakers was a bad movie, but I also couldn’t bring myself to act like it was good.  Probably the first thing I noticed about the movie is that it was entirely predictable.  Around the point of the IRS thing in the story, I could’ve guessed how the rest of it was going to turn out.  I guess I couldn’t have predicted that they were going to entirely forget to wrap up the Gene Hackman story though.  Did they get his money?  Did they get nothing?  Did the police suspect the strange woman he had been spending all his time with?  Or are we just going to forget about that storyline and jump back into the Jason Lee love story?  Probably that one.  This could easily be tolerable if the movie was entertaining, but it sadly fell short.  It just wasn’t funny to me.  There were maybe one or two mildly amusing moments in the movie, but one or two will not sustain me for over two hours of movie.  If it had ended about a half hour earlier when it should have … well … I probably still wouldn’t have found it very entertaining.  And I’m always confused about how that happens when they have the good sense to hire some really funny people to act in the movie.  Kevin Nealon, Sarah Silverman, and Zach Galifianakis were all in this movie.  You couldn’t have asked their opinion on punching up a few jokes?  Instead, you have a joke where a guy dies by falling over and hitting his face on a statue’s penis, a penis that then ends up in his mouth while he’s on the floor.  I wrote that same joke once … when I was 10.  It got lots of laughs.  I ended up spending a good portion of the movie focusing on these two women and their abilities as con women.  They did not seem all that great at their job.  When they reveal that they are con women early in the movie, they are super blunt about it, revealing everything at a gas station with all the wig removal and conning a guy into buying their gas.  Was I not supposed to have figured that out a long time ago?  When I saw Jennifer Love Hewitt for the first time, I knew they were con women.  Well, first I touched myself, and THEN I knew they were con women.  Later in the movie, I started to realize that they weren’t that good at it.  Why would they leave their money in a bank, especially if they weren’t going to pay the IRS?  Even though you know they have money and would be afraid of government investigation, why would you con someone in organized crime?  That just seems dangerous.  If you’re going to decide to take on an unnecessary Russian accent to woo your target, shouldn’t you learn more than the word for “Yes” and the lyrics to a Beatles song about the USSR?  Or at least try to stay out of situations where someone might find out that you didn’t do your research and learn the language?  And how did it take them so long to figure out that they should perhaps ask the mobster who shows up in love with Max how they should dispose of the dead body they had created?

All that being said, I’d say the real reason to watch this movie is the performances.  Well, not so much the performances as the performers.  And not so much the performers as Sigourney Weaver and Jennifer Love Hewitt being really hot.  I found the movie predictable, a little dumb, and extremely rarely funny, but they were able to keep me watching by having those two lovely ladies wearing some skimpy clothing through the greater majority of the movie.  I spent most of the movie trying to figure out which one I’d rather have.  Physically, JLH is hotter, and almost to a ridiculous extent.  When they were talking about how fast they could get a guy to marry them, I was thinking that 3 months seems like a long time and either woman could probably get me to do it way faster than that.  But I actually think Sigourney could do it faster.  I mean, she’s got way more nerd cred.  She was in the Alien movies AND Ghostbusters.  And did you see the underwear she wore on her honeymoon with Liotta?  Ridiculous.

For as much as I thought Heartbreakers was predictable, too long, and not funny, I didn’t really find the movie painfully bad.  And I think it’s entirely based on Sigourney Weaver and Jennifer Love Hewitt’s hotness.  There are people that may find this movie funny.  I wasn’t one of them, but I could see it happening.  But if you’re a guy and you can’t watch a movie with Sigourney Weaver and Jennifer Love Hewitt dressed skimpy and hot, then there’s a very good chance you like penis.  You can check this movie out on Netflix streaming if vagina is more to your liking.  Heartbreakers gets “I love a woman who eats raw meat” out of “Isn’t that the same shoe you wanted to jam up my ass?”

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