Friday, August 22, 2014

2014 Summer Retrospective: The Other Woman




 The Other Woman may be the worst movie I’ve seen all year.  Its characters are nonsensical, it’s humor humorless and its plot deranged and aggravating.  This is the kind of movie that give Girls Night Out flicks such a terrible reputation.  It’s difficult to find a movie as poorly crafted, stupid and lacking in fun as this one.

The plot revolves around three women, all of which who are the mistresses and/or wives of the same guy, and their attempt to get vengeance on said mutual lover.  This is an intriguing premise to say the least, especially from a comedic standpoint, but unfortunately any potential the premise has is wasted on its terrifyingly underwritten script. 

The plot of the movie, a revenge plot, doesn’t even get started until the movies already half way over.  The first fifty minutes or so of the thing meander around plot points in what seems to be the slowest manner possible.  It feels like it should be getting ready to end before we even meet Kate Upton’s character, but at that point it’s only just beginning.  How long could it take to establish a grand total of five main characters?  The first act of a movie is usually the shortest of the three act structure, but In the case of The Other Woman it takes up nearly an hour of the hundred minute run time.

A little bit of functional humor and likable characters can go along way to make an audience ignore bad plot structure, the recent Guardians of the Galaxy is a good example of this.  But the Other Woman has neither Humor nor likable characters.  It’s just not very funny or interesting.  I never at once laughed at the situation the three women were in, nor did I believe that, given each of the characters individual character traits, that they would ever become friends with each other in the first place.  The three of them are either despicable, annoying or both, and It is not a particularly pleasant experience to see them interact on screen.

Then there’s the villain, at least he’s supposed to be the villain.  Despite the fact that his adultery is what brings the three leads together,  he is surprisingly absent from any important plot points until near the end of the picture, when they discover that he’s got some kind of money laundering scheme or something going on.  In the final scenes the women actually get revenge on him, by revealing to the world his maniacal schemes.  It bizarre to me that the filmmakers found it necessary to make the main antagonist of their movie not only a lying cheating twerp, but an international criminal as well.  He is one of the most unrepentantly evil characters in cinema since Dr. Evil from the Austin Powers movies.  This one dimensional nothing-villain is the final nail in the coffin that, with any luck, all of the blu-ray copies of The Other woman are being buried in.

If you watched only the ending of The Other Woman you would think that the whole movie builds up to the destruction of one villainous human being, but that is simply not the case.  The movie is really about three unlikable characters being unlikable around each other; and then at the end they decide to get revenge as an afterthought.  This movies script is worse then bad, it’s incompetent.   It’s not good drama, it’s not good comedy, and it’s not even so bad it’s good.  The Other Woman is just bad, almost entirely bad.  I agree that there need to be more movies marketed towards women in Hollywood, but there is no excuse for this.

Thank you all for reading!  If like what you read you can follow Atchley-O-Saurus on Twitter at @atchleyosaurus or on facebook.  If you don't like what you read, feel free to email me a piece of your mind  at atchleyosaurus@gmail.com.  Be sure to check back later this weekend for my Sin City 2 review!

No comments:

Post a Comment