My experience of watching The Other Woman can best be equated to being presented with a large
iced cake, only to take a forkful and realise that beneath a miniscule layer of
icing there lies nothing but impacted excrement. The film comes courtesy of
director Nick Cassavetes (whose previous crime against celluloid was 2004’s The Notebook) and is intended as a story
of female empowerment as one woman (Cameron Diaz) who, upon discovering that
her boyfriend is married, teams up with the wife (Leslie Mann) and another
secret lover (Kate Upton) to take revenge.
The biggest of many, many problems with the film is that it
pretends to be a story of female empowerment: I’m not sure if I missed a
meeting, but since when has swooning over every male character, getting drunk
and being sick into handbags been the mainstay of strong female characters? There
is also a horrific display of double standards: could you imagine a film where
a group of men get their own back on a cheating woman by suggesting that they
kick her in between the legs or supply her with hormone pills designed for
pre-op trans-sexuals? The initial promise portrayed by the film’s poster (a
knuckleduster sporting a wedding ring in place of a spike) is scuppered within
the first five minutes.
The three leads actresses are incessantly annoying, Diaz
sporting a possibly plastic-enhanced smile all the way through, Leslie Mann
apparently under the belief that any line of dialogue can be made funnier
simply by shouting it, and Kate Upton is there purely for set dressing. The
second Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (playing the cheating husband) walks into frame,
the women (even the ones he has cheated on and lied to) can’t help but fall
instantly in love with him. Nicki Minaj is cast as an assistant to Diaz’ lawyer
character (no, I’m not making that up), and spends her scenes plastered in
grotesque layers of make-up and doing her best to shove her bottom at the
camera.
As if that last piece of casting wasn’t enough, the entire
film seems to be populated by the interior decoration of Maxim magazine,
everyone looking perfectly tanned with perfect hair and nails and sporting snow-white
teeth. None of the events or the dialogue bears anything even resembling real
life, at best looking slightly tacky and at worst giving characters lines like ‘you
need to cry on the inside, like winners do’. I guess that makes me the biggest
winner in the entire universe, because I left the cinema positively bursting
with internal tears.
At best, one could say that the film is coherently put
together…and that’s it. There is nothing else in this vacuous, grotesque,
star-studded pile of crap to redeem it, and the fact that it has just taken
around $25 million in America is a depressing reminder of the state of modern
cinema. At least Devil’s Due had the
decency to make me feel so ill that I could have prematurely left the cinema
with my integrity intact, but The Other
Woman kept me pinned, mentally kicking and screaming for the entirety of
its’ unbearable 110 minutes.
0.5 Stars
