‘Sweet’ Leaves A Sour Taste

The Sweetest Thing, Cameron Diaz’s latest comedic vehicle, has been billed as a romantic comedy in the tradition of There’s Something About Mary. Certainly, there is something all too familiar about most of the gags. Because the film lacks the guileless audacity of Something About Mary, however, there just aren’t enough laughs to sustain the flimsy plot-line.

The plot centers around the hapless antics of three San Francisco twenty-something women searching for love and commitment in all the wrong places. The film begins as Diaz’s Christina falls in love with a charming and respectable real estate agent she met at a club (Peter Donahue). On the urgings of her best friend (Christina Applegate), Diaz embarks on a cross-California road trip to reunite with her star-crossed lover and resolve their unfinished romance in his hometown.

What ensues includes predictable gags about run-ins with highway cops, distasteful incidents in dilapidated gas station restrooms best left unspecified, and a general celebration of mindless bimbo-dom. It should be immediate cause for concern that the credits see a direct re-play of all the “funniest” moments in the film, as if we need to be reminded of each and every laugh.

It doesn’t get much more rudimentary than this—and perhaps this is the intention of director Roger Kumble (Cruel Intentions). Once settled into its seemingly random and chaotic pace with characters and overly elaborate gags tumbling on top of each other, it becomes clear that the film is nothing more than a high farce of the first degree. Subtlety is banished not only in humor, but also in the ultimate climax of the plot, in which we see Christina realize—only after copious amounts of melodramatic sobbing, of course—that when it comes to matters of the heart, her self-help bibles are right: “thou shalt not be afraid.”

Cue a traditional romantic ending to what has to be the crudest movie of the year, replete with white wedding dresses and cutesy music. This is a movie with a serious identity crisis: perhaps once the directors realized that it was simply too unfunny to be billed as a gross-out comedy, they played up the sentimental overtones in the hope that the movie would metamorphose into a sweet romantic comedy. Sadly, however, The Sweetest Thing ends up satisfying neither niche.