Serving Sara

After viewing “Triple X” a couple of weeks ago and “Serving Sara” this week, I’m beginning to suspect that Hollywood, perhaps in an effort to save money in our struggling economy, is secretly hiring fourth-grade boys to write all their scripts. I thought no one could pen lines more pre-adolescent than Vin Diesel’s coolest-kid-in-the-elementary-school insults, but Serving Sara’s authors were more than up to the challenge. You tell me—does the following piece of opening dialogue sound like it could have come from the playground or not: --“Kiss my butt.”—“I can’t, my lips aren’t big enough.” I kept waiting for all the other characters to turn around and say “oooh, burn!” I promise you—it doesn’t get any more mature, and it gets a lot more vulgar, throughout the rest of the movie.

Truly, “Serving Sara” was such a silly waste of time, I hardly feel compelled to analyze it. But to provide some frame of reference for your date-night movie choices, here’s the basic plot: a spoiled, trophy wife (Elizabeth Hurley) finds she has become “the older model” to her Texas husband and is served divorce papers by processor Matthew Perry. After she offers him one-million dollars, Perry agrees to set aside her papers and serve her husband first so that she can get a better divorce settlement. Naturally, there are several bad guys out to foil their plan, and I’m sure we can all guess how, after plenty of banjo-scored hijinks, everything turns out.

I had high hopes for this film, and its kind of a shame because the premise seems to have a lot of slapstick potential. Unfortunately, “Serving Sara” boasts nothing, including Matthew Perry, that can save it from a late-night Comedy Central fate. Both Perry and Hurley phone in their performances—although I should say Hurley appears to relish her “white trash” costumes (their words, not mine) in a particularly wriggly way. I suppose I can’t lay all the blame for this disaster at her or Matthew Perry’s feet, considering they had absolutely no quality material to work with. However, while I may not be able to question their acting abilities, I can certainly question their judgment. With a script that goes for the cheap laugh and predictable outcome at every turn, I’d rather stay home and watch “Friends”.