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As the old saying goes, “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.” Team one scorned woman with two others, then, and you could be in for one wild (and vicious) experience—or, as director Nick Cassavetes’s The Other Woman suggests, you could simply end up with a whole bunch of childish hysterics.
The Other Woman stars Cameron Diaz as Carly, a successful lawyer who seems to have found the perfect man in her new boyfriend, Mark (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau). When he cancels plans to meet her dad (Don Johnson) due to plumbing issues at his home in Connecticut, Carly decides to drive out to surprise him—only to be greeted at the door by Mark’s wife, Kate (Leslie Mann).
Kate instantly suspects that something is up—and after she confronts Carly at her office, she completely falls apart. Convinced that her life is over, she turns to the one person who knows the whole story: Carly. As the two become unlikely friends, they soon discover that they’re not alone. And, together with Mark’s other girlfriend, Amber (Kate Upton), they set out to get their revenge.
There’s no denying that the set-up of The Other Woman is rather dubious. After all, it’s pretty hard to believe that a woman would become BFFs with her husband’s mistress—and, admittedly, that makes it difficult to get into the story. But the questionable plot is just the beginning of the problems for this grating comedy.
For much of the film, Mann’s Kate is absolutely hysterical—far more hysterical than any grown woman should be. Sometimes she’s angry and hysterical. Sometimes she’s sad and hysterical. But, no matter what her motivation may be, she screams her lines more than she speaks them—and the results are almost always shrill and irritating. And even though Diaz’s Carly is often refreshingly cool and collected, she simply can’t balance out Kate’s shrieking fits of hysteria.
With so much unlikely bonding and girly hysterics taking up the film’s focus, then, it takes a surprising amount of time for the story to go anywhere. Amber doesn’t come into the picture until the end—and, for that reason, the women’s revenge seems rushed. Really, it’s little more than a series of childish pranks (toothbrush in the toilet, Nair in his shampoo, laxatives in his water glass), followed by one grand (but hurried) finale—with some bad slapstick comedy thrown in for extra (forced) laughs. And the longer it goes, the stranger—and more painfully ridiculous—it gets.
Had it been a little darker and a lot more calculating, The Other Woman could have been a delightfully sinister revenge comedy. Instead, it’s just a strange and increasingly irritating chick flick.
Blu-ray Review:
If you enjoy the girly hysterics of The Other Woman, you’ll find more of the same on the Blu-ray release’s special features menu. In addition to eight deleted scenes, extras include both a gag reel and another, similar feature, called Giggle Fit. As you might expect, these extras feature a whole lot of dancing, a whole lot of giggling, and even more shrieking. So if you didn’t get enough of that during the movie, feel free to dig into the extras, too.
