DVD REVIEW: "The Heartbreak Kid"

If you want to know how to take the heart out of "The Heartbreak Kid," just ask the Farrelly Brothers.

Elaine May's 1972 original featured Charles Grodin as the title character, a Jewish kid of extremely low self-esteem who, while on his honeymoon in Miami Beach with his sweet, good natured, but rather plain, wife falls in love with a blond, barely approachable but ultimately shallow shiska goddess, whom he will undoubtedly dump as soon as he wins her.

In the Farrelly Brothers re-working of the film, there is no title character. Instead we have Ben Stiller as Eddie Cantrow falling for and marrying a Cameran Diaz wannabe named Lila (played to the comic hilt by Malin Akerman) who turns out to be the bride from hell. This is not fair. This turnaround makes Eddie the victim and not his bride. Anyway, this time they honeymoon in Mexico (so we get every tasteless ethnic piece of humor the Farrellys can come up with involving Mexicans) where Eddie meets and falls in love with Miranda (Michelle Monaghan, pictured here with Stiller) the ultimate personification of all that's marvelous about southern womanhood. Let's see, which one should he choose, the Bride of Frankenstein or Miss America?

Midway through this thing, however, I'm thinking if Stiller as Eddie is grating on Lila's nerves as much as he is on mine, then the two really do deserve each other or possibly Lila should dump him. Instead of a guy with low self esteem, we get a self-centered jerk--the kind who turns in his leased car every year for the newer updated model strictly out of habit, not because he has actually given the transaction any kind of serious thought.

In the original, I wanted both the Grodin character and his bride to wind up happy, even if it meant they would have to be happy without each other. The sadness came when I realized the Grodin character could never be happy. In this remake, I could care less what happened to Stiller and his bride, as long as it didn't happen anywhere near me. It's difficult to like a romantic comedy when there are no characters in it to root for.

Grade: C-