The Heartbreak Kid

A honeymooner (Ben Stiller) falls for another woman (Michelle Monaghan) while his bride (Malin Akerman) is laid up with a vicious sunburn. Directors Peter and Bobby Farrelly give their treatment to the 1972 Neil Simon semi-classic (from a story by Bruce Jay Friedman), retaining only the basic premise while dumping the Simon-Friedman nuance and irony (in the original, a selfish cad ditches his sweetly frumpy Jewish wife to pursue an icy WASP princess in whose family’s eyes—and in her own—he is less than nothing). There are some honest laughs, but the movie unravels when the Farrellys (and co-writers Scot Armstrong and Leslie Dixon) begin grafting their own bright ideas onto the story, and soon the laughs are coming from the boys’ undisciplined raunchiness rather than from the characters or situation.