Serving Sara (2002)

The biggest joke is on those who paid to see this.A process server, Joe Tyler (played by Matthew Perry) is given the task of serving divorce papers on Sara Moore (Elizabeth Hurley), the wife of of a wealthy Texas businessman. To do so he needs to contend with her attempts at evasion and the attempts of a colleague to undermine him.You would think that the comedy of Matthew Perry and the allure of Liz Hurley would make for a decent movie. They do the best they can, but are massively undermined by the script writers. The movie is not funny. The attempts at jokes are incredibly bad - even Perry with his great physical humour, timing and delivery can't make them work. You can't polish a turd...On the plus side (and it's the only plus), Liz Hurley does light up the screen and is a good distraction from the woefulness of the remainder of the movie.Interesting to note that the supporting cast includes Amy Adams in one of her earliest movies.Avoid.

The only reason this exists is because of the success of "Midnight Run", but three things went horribly wrong."Midnight..." was a comedy built on a solid foundation, there was an entire back story (rival entities) that supported the smartly constructed platform. There's no foundation here beyond stereotypes. You can see the formula at work as this grinds out: the producers wanted this 'joke' or that 'funny scene', and they commissioned the writer to scrape a plot between those nodes.The producers imagined that Perry's years on TV would have guaranteed an attendant audience; but this was plainly beyond the pale. Folks, comedy is difficult; spasms aren't enough. You need real pros to pull this off, people willing to invest themselves. Hurley? Nope. Cedric? Nope.Elfman integrated a fine, fine musical narrative to accompany DeNiro and Grodin...here, Miller phones in a half-hearted hack job. A shame because Miller really is a capable instrumentalist/writer/producer. Thankfully, we have his work with alto sax wizard Sanborn with which to clear our minds of this annoyance.

Let's take the framework of "Midnight Run," turn DeNiro's character into a process server played by, oh, I don't know, anyone that fills the leather jacket and rewrite Charles Grodin's fine character into, oh, I don't know, some hot chick whose butt we all want to stare at for 90 minutes since there is very little else of interest here. Rewrite the classic mannerisms of Marvin Doerfeller as a bumbling co-worker to be more Italiano and make Joe Pantolinano's well-acted, sleazy bail bondsman character into a black guy with a penchant for clever one-liners when the story begins to sag and the money shots of that butt begin to lose their luster.This story was better the first time around, when it was, oh, I don't know, worthy of the screen.

I remember when "Serving Sara" came out I was in the process of moving to England and there were commercials on TV during my pack-out. Each one showed the scene where Elizabeth Hurley gets her pants torn off by Matthew Perry and says, "I said to help me, not undress me!" Of course it was a clever marketing scheme to get teenaged boys (and indeed any males) into the theaters in the hopes of seeing Liz Hurley in underwear for two hours, but they neglected to let audiences know as soon as she says this, she covers herself up with a suitcase and gets a new pair of pants.The whole movie is like this. It's tricky and devious. The ads presented it as something it wasn't. One critic (was it that awful Earl Dittman of the non-existent Wireless Magazine?) said Liz Hurley was like (and I quote) "...Lucille Ball." Oh, right. Maybe if Lucille Ball had undergone hours of plastic surgery, looked anorexic, had a British accent, long flowing hair, had been unfunny, and single-handedly helped bomb every movie she starred in.Liz Hurley is an awful actress and (I personally think) just so-so in terms of looks. (Any ugly person can look sexy with millions of dollars. Just look at Paris Hilton.) She's not the only fault of "Serving Sara." The script is like a crappy version of "Midnight Run." It's about bounty hunters and women being tracked down and ruthless guys hiring other hit men to take hit men out and... I honestly stopped caring about ten minutes into the film.Matthew Perry (looking bloated, unhealthy and utterly bored) basically just mumbles through the whole film. I like Perry (at least on "Friends") but this is not his Big Breakthrough. (Neither was "The Whole Ten Yards," for that matter.) I don't think this is a totally hideous movie - I mean, it's not unbearable to watch. I managed to sit through it. But I was checking my watch a lot.And then I recalled how, in England, once I arrived overseas, it went straight to video, never given a theatrical release: and I could totally understand why.