The only two surprising moments of The Other Woman come at the very beginning and the very end. It is the same moment ,in fact. This moment is when the words "written by Melissa Stack" shows up in the beginning and closing credits. For a film that hates women so passionately that the production of this film alone should be considered a hate crime of misogyny, it is shocking that a female wrote the three main characters as such dumb bimbos. These three main characters are Carly (Cameron Diaz), Kate (Leslie Mann) and Amber (Kate Upton.)
The set up: Carly has a seemingly happy life with New York businessman Mark (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau,) who goes on constant "business trips" to various places. When Mark has to travel to Connecticut for a business trip, Carly gets upset with his constantly not being around and briefly scolds him. Carly then feels bad and goes to his "vacation home" to apologize and provide intercourse when he meets Kate. Kate is Mark's wife and they hatch a plan to get back at him. Let me pause right here before I even explain the role of Amber. Carly and Kate's plan is not the first sign of how much this film hates woman. It's not even the first immediate sign, which is shown through the first scene of Kate in which she's nagging at Mark for absolutely no reason. In this scene, it's as if screenwriter Stack and director Nick Cassavetes are telling the audience that Mark is justified in cheating on his wife. However, I digress...back to the point I was trying to make. The plot involves Carly and Kate ruining Mark's life by doing such things as putting laxatives in his drink, putting hair remover in his shampoo and giving him male growth hormones in the form of smoothies. In this way, the film portrays these women as people who are in need of checking in at a mental hospital. The fact that they don't just both leave Mark as any normal woman would do is not funny...it's just soul crushing. Moving on...Carly and Kate find out, through a series of events too convoluted to even explain, that Mark is cheating on both of them with Amber. This leads the film to the typical ditsy blonde, this time played as such an obvious gimmick that it's unbearable to watch Upton embarrass herself so much.
The film sets up another problem as well. Kate's brother, Phil (Taylor Kinney) tells Kate about 20 minutes into the film to just divorce Mark and get it over with. The audience was already thinking the same thing so when her brother tells her it directly, any logic as to why any of these three women would proceed to ruin Mark's life in ways a five year old would use to get back at his mother for not buying him a new video game console is gone. This is not to say that there was any to begin with. This is just to say that up until then, it could at least be justified a minimal amount in the context of the film.
This is a comedy in which there are no laughs. However, if you like your comedies depressing, deadly dull and overall horrible then The Other Woman will prove to be right up your alley. Even the final sequence of comeuppance is depressing because it makes Mark the ultimate sympathetic victim by giving him way more pain than he deserves. I can honestly say that it will be hard to find a worse film to come out in 2014 and it's very early in the year.
(0 out of 5 Stars, The film is rated PG-13 for mature thematic material, sexual references and language)
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