The Heartbreak Kid (2007)

The Heartbreak Kid arrives in 2007 carrying its predecessor's title, its director's reputation, and very little else on its mind. Ben Stiller plays Eddie, a San Francisco sporting goods proprietor who marries a woman he has known for two months and then spends a Mexican honeymoon discovering, in escalating detail, that he has made a poor decision. The Farrelly brothers build their comedy from sunburn, a deviated septum, aggressive hotel-room exertions, and a jellyfish sting resolved by urination in front of an audience. This is not a film reaching for the culture's better angels. It is a film reaching for the nearest available gag, and finding it every time.

On the matter of representation, the cast is a wall of whiteness interrupted by Carlos Mencia as a hotel owner, Eva Longoria as a final-act wife, and Luis Accinelli as an elderly local who absorbs Eddie's drunken monologue. These are scenery, not characters, and the film never pauses to consider them. Race is present as texture and absent as subject. The one nominally progressive detail, Lila's employment as an environmental researcher, exists to justify the rushed marriage and is subsequently treated as another of her defects. The environmentalism is not championed. It is a punchline waiting its turn.

Elsewhere the ledger sits empty. No queer presence. No feminist counterweight to the nightmare-wife machinery. No economic critique from a hero who owns his own shop. No body-positive instinct in a picture that mines a woman's chest for a running joke, and no interest in the interior lives of anyone who might be wired differently. The film does not lecture, moralize, or instruct. It commits to its own coarseness with the dedication of a craftsman who has chosen his material and will not be talked out of it. We classify it accordingly, note the faint flickers, and move on.