It has been a while since we’ve seen a good con flick, especially a comedy, and with the opening of Heartbreakers it looks like it’s going to be a while longer. Heartbreakers sports a solid cast, including Sigourney Weaver, Ray Liotta and Gene Hackman, but the sloppy script and tiresome, hackneyed jokes pretty much waste this pool of talent.
Max (Sigourney Weaver) and Page (Jennifer Love Hewitt) are a mother-daughter con team. Max dupes rich men into marriage and Page tempts them into an extramarital romp, which Max ’’accidentally’’ walks in on. The grifter tag team then walks away with a healthy divorce settlement and moves on to the next mark.
Their latest patsy is Dean (Ray Liotta), who pays out a handsome $300, 000 to the ’’disgraced’’ Max. Things are going swimmingly until Page decides she wants to take her show independent. Mom reluctantly agrees to divvy up their earnings, but it turns out the IRS visited the bank just before the girls, leaving them virtually penniless. Forced to stick together, the pair head down to the home of the rich and elderly, Palm Beach, to work one last major scam together. Max sets to work on chain-smoking billionaire Tensy (Gene Hackman), and Page falls into her own grift, scheming Jack (Jason Lee) out of his beachfront bar, potentially worth millions. The plot thickens to a thin gruel when Page actually falls for Jack but is forced to see the con through.
When you get right down to it, Heartbreakers is never more than highly mediocre. There are some singularly funny moments, and some good acting, but the predictable jokes and annoyingly obvious plot continually erode the comedic aspects to the point of simple dullness. Sure, it’s funny the first time Tensy almost collapses in a noisy, phleghm-filled cough, but is it just as funny the sixth or seventh time? How many times can you make the erect penis of a nude sculpture the highlight of a joke before it becomes limp? Are we really expected to believe that a professional con artist like Page is suddenly going to grow a conscience? And will someone please tell director David Mirkin (Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion) that we don’t need obvious song lyrics to tell us what’s going on with a character whenever they’re not engaged in dialogue.
If you like comedy to jump up and bang you on the head with punch line, then you might like Heartbreakers. For everyone else, don’t be scammed by this lukewarm wanna-be comedy.