Movie Review: The Other Woman

The Other Woman (2014)


After discovering her boyfriend is married, Carly soon meets the wife he's been betraying. And when yet another love affair is discovered, all three women team up to plot revenge on the three-timing S.O.B.  Short synopsis of The Other Woman taken from IMDb.com  

My wife rented this one and we watched it together late one evening.  The Other Woman was amusing as a premise, but the execution was a bit flatter than I had expected from the movie trailer. The cheating husband villain character was so one-dimensional as to be almost a caricature of what this sort of guy should be, I thought.


And said cheating husband's comeuppance was downright slapstick. When at the film's climax, hubby discovers he has been found out and his wife (Leslie Mann, upstaging almost every scene she is in from lead Diaz, in my opinion), his “mistress” - though she continually insists she doesn’t qualify for the term - (aforementioned Cameron Diaz, who does the best with what she’s given here and manages to fill the role well enough) and his fling (the blatantly eye-candy Kate Upton, who… well, let’s face it, her looks could make a blind man stand up and take notice, but her acting repertoire is not heavily taxed here) confront him, the poor guy ends up walking repeatedly into plate glass, then enduring the de riguer car tow, and finally getting punched out by Diaz’s character’s father, played with tongue ever-so-slightly-wedged-in-cheek by Don Johnson. As a side note, my wife - though she says she enjoyed the film - exclaimed at the plate glass incident point: “oh that poor guy,” and felt the denouement was a bit overboard.

Skip ahead to 1:23 or so to see what I'm talking about here.  When I think of plate glass scenes in a movie, inevitably Ryan O'Neil and Barbra Streisand come to mind. My mom loves the film What's Up Doc?  I saw this repeatedly in my youth.  The choreography of events in that movie are so precise...  modern directors could take a note, I think.

Now you may say that since I’m a man, I’d certainly sympathize with the cheating guy as a character, simply because he is a man and I am a man.  "Bros before ho's," as the saying goes, I suppose.  Wow, that last had quite the alliteration, didn't it.  "Bro's before ho's, I suppose..."  Has a certain ring...

Anyway,  I’d like to hope this bias is not the case. Yes, cheating husband character is scum. At the film’s climax, when asked how often he has cheated, he quips “I get more ass than a toilet seat.” A classy sort, this one. The problem is, this scene has been done before, and better. So all in all, it wasn’t much more than an hour and a half, give or take, of jilted woman revenge fantasy. Well, I take that back. There was some bonding between the main female characters that was sometimes amusing and sometimes almost poignant, though I’d admit my occasionally jaded nature may be coloring that last from allowing me full-blown involvement in the film’s plot. I guess the way I see it is that The Other Woman didn’t enhance my life to any degree above the fact that I got to spend the time relaxing with my wife on a weekday night. It wasn’t bad, per-se. It just wasn’t really good either.

The perfect definition of both slapstick humor, and the grand point of The Other Woman (if you imagine the slappee as the loser husband and slapper as any one of the women he cheats on). / Source: bt5w.com

If you haven’t seen The Other Woman yet and think it may be humorous due to its trailer, I am here to burst your bubble and tell you that the trailer makes it look much more entertaining, as an overall experience, than it really is. Not highly recommended by any stretch of the imagination, unless you are really in the mood for seeing a low-life cheater get his just desserts. Oh, and for hearing singer Nicki Manaj in her almost cameo role as Diaz’s pragmatic secretary opine: “Selfish people live longer.”

Then again, what do I know? The most interesting thing I’ve watched lately is old episodes of That ‘70s Show, and in doing so, getting a kick out of the times when Kurtwood Smith’s character Red Forman calls various show characters: “dumb asses.” High art it ain’t.

Truer words... / Source: motifake.com

 

The parting comment:

Source: LOLSnaps.com

That's a pretty clever idea, you know.  But I'd probably just end up losing it in my sleep, and then the bed would be buzzing at ten past ten in the AM and I'd be sleeping on blissfully unaware.