Along Came Polly

I was having a great time for about 10 minutes there.

First there was the trailer for "Starsky & Hutch", a modern take-off of the 70's cop show, starring Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson in the title roles and Snoop Dogg as Huggy Bear. It sounded lame to me until I saw this trailer, which was very funny and suggests that it could be a really intelligent spoof in the mold of the great, underrated "Undercover Brother" if done right.

Then came the new, longer trailer for "Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind", which just keeps looking better and better to me. It's a surreal comedy/drama from director Michel Gondry (who has directed some truly brilliant music videos for artists like Bjork, Foo Fighters, and the Chemical Brothers), and it stars Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Kirsten Dunst, Mark Ruffalo, Elijah Wood, and Tom Wilkinson. Looks awesome.

Then came "Van Helsing". Not too much to say about that one, except that it has a look that's similar to "The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen", and I didn't want to see that either.

Finally, there was the great new trailer for the remake of "Dawn Of The Dead", a movie that I was actually lucky enough to see a test screening of and it's pretty damn awesome.

So I was having a good time...and then "Along Came Polly" started.

Honestly, this movie is barely worth talking about because it's so totally lame and predictable. The characters played by Ben Stiller and Jennifer Aniston are so thinly drawn that they don't even seem like real people, just markers being nudged down an extremely familiar path by a screenplay that exists in a dimension BEYOND cliche.

Stiller plays Reuben Feffer, who is pretty much the exact same character he always plays in movies like this, and Aniston's Polly is such a ghost of a character that she only has one personality trait that I could pick out. She's wishy-washy. That's it, that's all there is to Polly. Because of this, when they finally get together at the end (oops! Did I spoil the suspense?) there is no emotional connection with the audience whatsoever. The reaction is more like "oh, they got back together. Whatever".

Also, I'm all for toilet humor when it's done correctly (like in "There's Something About Mary", the movie that this is obviously trying to copy), but here it's weak, desperate, and makes the movie feel even cheaper.

There is one good thing. Philip Seymour Hoffman supplies a good number of laughs (pretty much the only ones in the movie) as Reuben's lecherous best friend Sandy, a former child star who is oblivious to his own foolishness. But even he is occasionally hamstrung by the terrible script.

Well hey, at least the trailers before it were fun.