The Other Woman (2014)

I’ve watched this film many many times on online and I should not have been shocked by the fact that it is critically reviled but if I’m honest I still quite like it. I think people have come to appreciate Cameron Diaz’s comedic abilities more in the past few years than they did at her peak in the 1990s and I think she’s a very likable presence here. Leslie Mann doesn’t a good job employing her usual shtick to extract a few laughs and Kate Upton is only present for her looks but they make a nice team.  

This isn’t a full comedic classic, it doesn’t meet 9 to 5 (1980) or even The Truth About Cats & Dogs (1996) but it’s an entertaining 97 minutes that will sufficiently fill a rainy day. Mark King, Nikolai Coster-Waldeau, is married to the dependable Kate, Leslie Mann, but is having affairs with career woman Carly, Cameron Diaz, and the buxom swimsuit model Amber, Kate Upton. Carly discovers this when she awkwardly attempts to seduce him at the house he shares with Kate. When Kate puts two and two together she comes to Carly hoping to team up against Mark and they unite with Amber after explaining the situation. What follows is them poisoning him and essentially ruining his life as they each move on with their own. Nick Cassavetes has directed two of my guilty pleasures with this and the considerably better The Notebook (2004) but he does have an aesthetic that appeals to my lizard brain. When we free download the movie, we see three attractive women wearing fabulous outfits moving from palatial offices in New York City to beautiful houses in the Hamptons. It’s a Nancy Meyers style of film-making but he has three female leads who aren’t as incredibly annoying as old age Diane Keaton.  

The gags are pulled off with some decent direction even as he steals everything from Dumb and Dumber (1994) to Ten (1979). Speaking of Ten, we get an extended homage to Bo Derek running down the beach as Upton wears a white bikini and runs along the sands of the Hamptons. These scenes gave me feelings of pleasure on a base level because I could identify that this was a film targeted at me and it hit all the beats that it needed to. Diaz’s performance stood out to me because she handles her character with dignity but also manages to deliver lines like “I used to drive a Jetta!” humorously. She is obviously an attractive woman and she and Coster-Waldeau make an good looking couple but she doesn’t seem so unattainable that she’s difficult to follow as a lead character. Mann sometimes annoys me but she’s better here than she is in Funny People (2009) or This is 40 (2012). Upton looks pretty, obviously, and Taylor Kinney is a decent fall back for Carly at the end of the film who’s not my flavor of man but who is appealing enough. Don Johnson makes a fun cameo as Carly’s father and although it was creepy that he ends up as Amber’s boyfriend at the end of the film it wasn’t as weird as seeing Sydney Pollack in Made of Honor (2008). The story is thin but screenwriter Melissa Stack manages to take a basic plot outline and insert funny, likable characters and some entertaining gags. She draws some of the best qualities out of Diaz and Mann and stops the film from being a fight over a man or for being a purely anti-men film as even though their eventual love interests are fantastical they are still more fleshed out than the women in Apatow movies. The pooping gag while cheap and perverse was handled funnily and the women’s discussion of how they will ruin their collective ex-lover’s life being punctuated by a joke about kicking a man in the balls felt fitting.  

I don’t ask for much out of my comedies and I think that considering the dearth of gross out films made for a female audience causes this film to be considered decent. I would recommend this film if only because it’s a film that allows you to turn your brain off without being utter mush and contains a lovely Cameron Diaz performance, those should always be treasured.