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Intolerable
Cruelty
is broad and light enough, had one not seen the opening credits,
to never, ever be mistaken for a Coen brothers film.
The brains behind flicks like Blood
Simple, Fargo and The
Man Who Wasn't There have never seemed so conventional.
They've also never tried to make a textbook romantic
comedy before, either. And
Cruelty is their first picture not to have been born from
their fertile yet off-kilter minds, as well as the first in
their 19-year career to feature help from an outside producer.
That said producer is Brian Grazer – the king of
middling un-Coen-y blockbusters like How
the Grinch Stole Christmas and Nutty Professor II:
The Klumps – does nothing to hinder their fall from grace.
Maybe
Cruelty is, like Full
Frontal, some kind of big inside joke us outsiders just
don't get. But the
Coens really don't seem like the type to pull a fast one like
that. Aside from a
few eccentric oddball characters and a couple of shots of a
feared man behind a big old desk, there is approximately one
moment in Cruelty that immediately would strike a viewer
as something distinctively Coen-esque.
Sadly,
change is not a good thing – at least when it comes to Cruelty.
George Clooney (Solaris)
plays shallow Miles Massey, Southern California's greatest
divorce lawyer and creator of the infamously unbreakable Massey
Prenup. Catherine
Zeta-Jones (Chicago) is Marylin
Rexroth, a gold-digging whore who Miles screws out of millions
during her divorce proceedings with her latest mark, Rex Rexroth
(Edward Herrmann, Gilmore Girls).
Apparently, there is some unwritten rule that states
divorce films must always costar Cedric the Entertainer, because
he's here, too, playing the same inconsequential role he did in Serving
Sara.
When
Miles falls for Marylin, a cat-and-mouse power struggle ensues
in fairly predictable fashion.
Co-writers Robert Ramsey and Matthew Stone also penned
groundbreaking comedies like Big
Trouble and Life, so what the heck did you
expect? Note to
aspiring writers: Clever
names do not a clever script make (Rex Rexroth, Ramona
Barcelona, Ollie Olerud, Donovan Donaly and, of course, Heinz
the Baron Krauss von Espy). Cruelty's gags include a
barely funny "Who's On First" routine and Miles'
"Love is Good" speech to a room full of
contemporaries, which sounds like Gordon Gecko after taking an
arrow from Cupid. And
here's a question for any attorneys out there:
Why does tearing up one copy of a prenuptial agreement
render it null and void? Who doesn't get more than one of them
signed? Has anyone
heard of triplicate?
On
the plus side, there's a hysterical Bruce Campbell cameo that
the cackling audience (the same folks who loved America's
Sweethearts, I imagine) just didn't get.
Cruelty, along with its two leads, looks downright
terrific, thanks to the warm lensing from Coen regular Roger
Deakins. Clooney's
role has the most meat, replacing Everett Ulysses McGill's hair
hang-up from O Brother, Where Art
Thou? with a maniacal fetish for having clean, white
teeth. But it's not
enough to keep Cruelty's disappointingly lame story
afloat.
| 1:40
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for
sexual content, language and brief violence |
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