Just
Married
Honeymoon
comedy gradually loses any charm it might have had
Sarah
McNerney (Brittany Murphy) comes from money and privilege,
though she herself is rather down-to-earth and
unpretentious.
Tom Leezak (Ashton Kutcher), who comes from middle class
roots, is now broke as he pursues his dream of being some
kind of sports commentator/journalist, though really
he’s just an illiterate boob.
The two fall in love.
How it happened: Tom is playing football on the beach with
some friends; Sarah is strolling along nearby. Tom conks
Sarah on the head with a wild pass, and quicker than you
can say Marcia Brady, the two are making marriage plans,
and get married, and are off on their honeymoon, in ye olde
Europe.
Europe is nothing new to Sarah, but Tom seems totally
surprised to learn that the Europeans have different
traditions and customs, and speak a language that is not
"American," as he calls the language that he speaks.
Of interest to mid-Valley audiences is the fact that former
Albany resident Sandy McCormack has a brief appearance as a
passenger on the plane that conveys the love birds to their
European retreat. McCormack is on the screen for all of
maybe two seconds, and his part could not have been
performed any better.
In Europe, the honeymoon quickly goes all to hell, fueled
largely by the American boorishness of Tom. More
embarassing than his boorishness, however, is the fact
that, if I read the director’s intentions right, I
think the American audiences were being asked to look at it
from Tom’s point of view and be on his side when, in
reality, he has no case at all on his side. None at all.
One example should suffice to describe the whole of their
trip: At an ancient villa, now a beautifully restored and
maintained hotel, Tom attempts to plug a vibrator into the
wall. Sarah tells Tom that the plugs are different in
Europe and that the vibrator won’t work. Now, anyone
who wasn’t a complete imbecile might muster at least
a little curiousity about why the plug won’t work and
ask for an explanation.
Tom, however, IS a complete imbecile. “Oh, I’ll
make it work,” he says with baseless certainty, as if
all technological challenges are nothing but a matter of
him asserting his Yankee arrogance. "I'll make it work."
Shoving and jabbing the plug at the outlet, he starts a
fire, shorts out the electrical system in the entire hotel,
and causes tens of thousands of dollars worth of damage
— and when the hotel manager comes to see what has
happened, Tom screams at the manager and blames the whole
incident on him. I did not sympathize with Tom. I disliked
him immensely. He's a total jerk. What could Sarah possibly
see in him? He's a 10-year-old boy who's been raised as a
spoiled brat.
It gets worse from there. Kutcher — whose acting
style here seems to be “when in doubt, scream the
line” — spends much of the time screaming at
the fact that Europeans are not Americans. Surprisingly, it
never did become endearing.
Murphy played the Sarah role well, capturing the essential
openness and wacky humor she would need to find anything
attractive in Kutcher’s Tom. In real life, someone as
worldly and educated as Sarah would probably just find him
dull and boring.
Sarah comes to realize that she’s married a boorish
moron, and the trip disintegrates into a hellish nightmare.
And yet the audience is clearly expected to root for the
crazy kids to get back together — But don't do it!!!
The answer is, they never should have gotten together in
the first place. They really need to not be together. They
are, in reality, a horrible match. Is that the way the
story will end? Hmmmm, I wonder: will Tom do one of those
romantic-comedy gesture scenes in which all of their
unsuitability will be blown away by his gesture?
Well, I won’t tell you what happens, except to say
that this is a typical Hollywood film, slobbering in hot
pursuit of your hard-earned green.