The Heartbreak Kid.

"If you haven't seen The Heartbreak Kid, Elaine May's 1972 adaptation of a short story by Bruce Jay Friedman (with a screenplay by Neil Simon), you're missing a minor, if somewhat dated, classic, a study in Jewish male sexual anxiety that fits comfortably (which is to say nervously and neurotically) alongside Portnoy's Complaint and the early films of Woody Allen and Paul Mazursky," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "If you haven't seen The Heartbreak Kid, Peter and Bobby Farrelly's new update of that earlier picture, I'm jealous."

"The first movie was a sharp-edged satire in which Cantrow had to face the melancholy consequences of attaining his shiksa trophy; the new one is a raunchy romp that mocks the fantasy of true love even as it hinges on it," writes Lawrence Levi at Nextbook. "Once you've added a sex-crazed bride and a poisonous jellyfish whose sting requires urine as an antidote, who needs subtext?"

Updated through 10/11.

For the Los Angeles Times' Carina Chocano, "the new Heartbreak Kid stands entirely on its own merits as a grim, shrill, deluded and incredibly depressing movie, so bewilderingly mean-spirited that the trademark Farrelly Brothers gross-out scenes feel like the sweetest."

"It would be bad enough if the picture was just unfunny; but it also has an unpleasant, mean-spirited sheen, with none of the Farrelly sweetness we got in pictures like Shallow Hal or Stuck on You," writes Stephanie Zacharek at Salon. "The movie creaks and groans under a load of uncharitable jokes (including a supercheap fat-person gag), and operates in some weird retro fantasyland in which women who like sex are sleazy, while sunny gals who turn cartwheels on the beach and wrinkle their noses adorably are real wife material."

"While the film needs the put-upon Ben Stiller of Flirting With Disaster or There's Something About Mary, it instead gets the recently emerged, more manic version of Stiller, who immediately throws the humor out of balance," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club.

"[T]he Farrelly Brothers return to R-rated comedy only to find themselves outmoded by Judd Apatow and company," writes Jesse Hassenger in the L Magazine.

The Farrellys "have specialized in over-the-top transgressive comedy..., but always before with characters who could survive their sort of acid bath," writes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. "Here the characters are made to do and say things that are outside their characters, and maybe outside any characters."

On the other hand: "While the film isn't as deeply felt as the hugely underrated Stuck on You or as consistently inventive as Mary, it's still enormously funny," writes R Emmet Sweeney at the Reeler.

In the Los Angeles Times, Jay A Fernandez talks with Malin Akerman about "the most unselfconscious performance by an actress in a comedy in recent memory."

Updates, 10/6: A "disappointing vulgarization," sighs Robert Keser at Slant. "Outwardly, this remake promises to reflect on winning second chances at love but inside pulses a sitcom brain focused on inexorably delivering the next laugh, even proceeding small screen-style in short segments shot with overabundant close-ups."

"[I]t's impossible to entirely dismiss the new Heartbreak Kid because it does indeed deliver on the laughs," writes Alonso Duralde for MSNBC. "You'll just feel guilty later when you realize that you gave your empathy to a character who doesn't deserve it."

Update, 10/11: "[T]o get a rise of the Apatow-infected public, the Farrellys have over-vulgarized their newest film The Heartbreak Kid," writes Armond White in the New York Press.

Posted by dwhudson at October 5, 2007 2:22 AM