Romantic comedies generally have a formula.
Boy and girl meet. Boy and girl instantly dislike each other, but are forced into a situation where they have to spend time together. Boy and girl, despite their differences, fall madly and passionately in love.
However, an obstacle or misunderstanding comes between boy and girl. Love is threatened. So boy or girl has to go to extreme lengths to prove their love to the other, and love wins in the end.
It is a tried and true calculation that always works as long as the characters are memorable, the humor is comical and the story rings true.
Unfortunately, “The Sweetest Thing” seems to forget about these basics.
Christina (Cameron Diaz) is an empowered woman in her late 20s who avoids close relationships with men, preferring to play games. On a night out with her friends, the sassy Courtney (Christina Applegate) and the innocent Jane (Selma Blair), she meets Peter (Thomas Jane, last seen as Mickey Mantle in “61*”) who frustrates her and makes her reassess her feelings toward love.
After he disappears, Christina and Courtney embark on a road trip to crash the wedding of Peter’s brother (Jason Bateman), but a series of supposedly comical misadventures ensures that all goes haywire. Adding to Christina’s misfortune is the realization that the wedding they have crashed is in fact for Peter and not his brother.
Nevertheless, it shouldn’t be a surprise to any viewer that this wedding does not end the film; Christina and Peter still pine for each other and go through loops to be reunited.
The premise isn’t so bad. The performances by the supporting cast, particularly Applegate’s quippy sexpot, range from good to stellar.
The biggest problem with this film is an unimaginative script from “South Park” scribe Nancy M. Pimental. It isn’t so bad that the film’s humor is mostly one-note gross-out sex jokes, but its gags are pilfered straight from better movies. The zipper gag from “There’s Something About Mary” becomes a piercing stuck in the wrong place during a sexual act.
The characters act as if they are characters in a movie instead of real people. Christina dances in the street to no soundtrack for no apparent reason, and a montage where Christina and Courtney try on different outfits is inserted to kill some time.
Roger Kumble’s (“Cruel Intentions”) direction isn’t any better. Scenes, such as where an embarrassed Jane delivers a semen-stained dress to a laundromat, are cut short before the joke can be fully established. Some of the less tasteful material probably had to be edited down in order to appease a ratings board, but it would have been better to cut a scene rather than murder a joke by cutting out key pieces.
“The Sweetest Thing” fails to be funny or sweet. Despite some solid chemistry between the actors, the awful script drags the picture down to uncharted depths.
