The Heartbreak Kid (2007 film)

The Heartbreak Kid is a 2007 American black comedy film directed by the Farrelly brothers. Starring Ben Stiller, it is a remake of the 1972 film of the same name. Also starring are Michelle Monaghan, Malin Åkerman, Jerry Stiller, Rob Corddry, Carlos Mencia, Scott Wilson and Danny McBride. The screenplay for the 2007 film was written by Leslie Dixon, Scot Armstrong, the Farrelly brothers and Kevin Barnett.
Plot.
Eddie Cantrow (Ben Stiller), the owner of a San Francisco sports shop, is single but ambivalent about starting a relationship. While walking, he sees a thief snatching a woman's purse. He tries but fails to retrieve the purse. He and its owner Lila (Malin Åkerman) exchange pleasantries but not numbers. Eddie finds Lila to be attractive and funny.
They begin dating and shortly after, become exclusive. Suddenly a new job offer requires Lila to move to Holland. However, her company has a policy of not deploying married employees abroad. At the urging of both his father, Doc (Jerry Stiller) and best friend, Mac (Rob Corddry), Eddie marries Lila after only dating a few months.
Before their wedding night, Eddie and Lila have never been sexually intimate and have not spent a lot of time getting to know each other. During the drive to their honeymoon in Cabo San Lucas, Eddie learns some new things about Lila he finds annoying, such as incessant singing. When they get to their resort room, they have sex for the first time and Eddie learns that Lila's sex drive is so wild that he suffers physical pain. Eddie's disaffection deepens when Lila divulges her history of substance abuse, a deviated septum, and her habit of spitting drinks out through her nose. He learns that professionally she was only a volunteer, and that the purse snatcher had been one of her former lovers that she owed money.
Eddie realizes he has made a mistake in marrying Lila, and that he rushed into the marriage without really getting to know her. He is not in love with Lila and finds some of her newly discovered behavior and bad habits to be intolerable.
At the Los Cabos resort run by Uncle Tito (Carlos Mencia), Lila adamantly refuses to use sunblock while sunbathing only in baby oil. She then blames Eddie for the agony of her second-degree sunburn. As the enormity of Eddie's mistake sinks in, he meets Miranda (Michelle Monaghan), a vacationer with her family from Mississippi. Eddie is immediately attracted to Miranda and finds himself spending most of his honeymoon with Miranda and her family while Lila is confined to her room due to the sunburn. Eddie meets Miranda's family and makes a favorable impression on all of them except for her cousin, Martin (Danny McBride). Martin senses that Eddie is hiding something. Eddie confides in Mac regarding his feelings about Lila and Miranda, stating that he doesn't want to be married to Lila anymore and that he has made a mistake. He tells Mac that he is falling for Miranda, whom he just met.
Sometime later that same evening, there is a misunderstanding between Eddie and Miranda's family because of twin boys Eddie previously met at a wedding. The twins told Miranda's family that Eddie came to Mexico to mourn his wife who was killed by a maniac with an ice pick, something Eddie told them sarcastically. Later on, Eddie decides to divorce Lila and tries to bring it up at lunch, when Martin and his brother Buzz (Roy Jenkins) learn of his secret. When Miranda learns about Lila, she and Eddie fall into the ocean and Eddie is attacked by a jellyfish (Lila treats the stings by urinating on him). After the chaos, Lila and Miranda both abandon him (Miranda for Eddie's deception and Lila for Eddie's wish of a divorce). Angry, Lila destroys Eddie's passport.
Eddie sinks into a depression and annoys a fellow Mexican named Manuel (Luis Accinelli) with his problems. Coerced by Uncle Tito, Eddie decides to go to Mississippi to make amends with Miranda. Border patrol agents repeatedly catch Eddie attempting to cross the U.S. border illegally with help from Tito. Eddie finally gets to Oxford, Mississippi. Upon meeting Miranda's family, he learns that she has married her previous boyfriend. Despite promising to leave Miranda alone, Eddie sneaks in and awakens Miranda as her husband sleeps. Her husband wakes up when Martin bursts in and attacks Eddie with a baseball bat, until Doc intervenes. Eddie agrees to leave if Miranda says she truly loves her new husband, which she does. Eddie leaves with Doc, without knowing that Miranda looks longingly from her balcony as he walks away.
Eighteen months later, Eddie is divorced from Lila (while also losing his sports store to her), and he moves permanently to Mexico to run a sporting good store. Sometime later, Miranda arrives in Mexico and finds Eddie. She tells him that she has left her husband and wants to be with him. Eddie is thrilled, but hides that he has a new wife, Consuela (Eva Longoria). At the end of the film he finds himself in the same predicament.
Promotion.
During the film's preview at the 2007 San Diego Comic-Con, a sex scene from the film was cut due to backlash for the nudity in prior films at the convention such as "300" and "Borat".
Reception.
Box office.
The film grossed in 3,219 theaters in its opening weekend, putting it in second place at the box office in North America. The film eventually grossed a total of worldwide, which includes $36,787,257 in North America and $90,979,393 in other territories.
Critical response.
Review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a score of 29% based on 157 reviews, with an average rating of 4.56/10. The website's critical consensus reads: "Despite some amiable performances, "The Heartbreak Kid" is neither as daring nor as funny as the Farrelly Brothers' earlier films". On Metacritic, the film had an average score of 46 out of 100, based on 30 reviews, which indicates "mixed or average reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "C" on an A+ to F scale.
Peter Travers (of "Rolling Stone") declared the film the year's Worst Remake on his list of the Worst Movies of 2007. Jonathan Rosenbaum (of "The Chicago Reader") dismissed it as "brain-dead".