Heartbreakers

Heartbreakers is a brazen sort of romantic comedy in the screwball-satire mode. The central pair are a mother-daughter team (Sigourney Weaver and Jennifer Love Hewitt) running a marriage-and-divorce scam on gullible but wealthy bachelors. Their first mark in the film is a New Jersey mobster (Ray Liotta) who runs a massive garage for “chopping” stolen cars. The second is a chain-smoking tobacco industry mogul (Gene Hackman) who is in danger of coughing himself to death before the seductive scam artists can get their hands on his millions. The saucy sardonic seductions of the two con women are the sharpest and funniest elements of the film, and their caricatures of bold female wiles form an amusingly apt partnership with the caricatured Pavlovian randiness of the men.