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"Shallow Hal"
(Reviewed October 28, 2001)
-
There are so many things wrong with this movie I hardly know where to begin. "Shallow Hal" is basically an Afterschool Special morality tale about how everyone would be better off if we could put more emphasis on people's inner beauty than their outward appearance. So far, so good. Unfortunately, that message gets thoroughly mangled by the movie's dumb, inconsistent and unexpectedly unfunny script.
Hal is a guy who prefers to date good-looking women, thus making him (and, dare I say, every other man alive) "shallow." Motivational guru Tony Robbins, playing himself, essentially hypnotizes Hal into seeing nice people as beautiful and bad people as ugly. The first problem script-wise is that Hal proceeds to make those perceptual judgments BEFORE EVEN TALKING TO PEOPLE. As soon as he sees Gwyneth Paltrow, and before she has given him any indication whatsoever as to what sort of personality she possesses, he sees her as sexy and skinny (even though she actually is enormously obese). Huh? It gets stupider. After it has been established that Gwyneth looks good because she IS good, she then makes two rude remarks to Hal's roommate (played by Jason Alexander) within 30 seconds of making his acquaintance. Wait a minute, shouldn't that make her start looking a little less hot? Nope!
Later, Hal meets Gwyneth's boss. As soon as he sees her, before she has uttered a single word, he envisions her as old and ugly. How did he know she had a bad personality? Shouldn't the guy at least have a brief chat with someone before he knows whether he should see her as hot or horrible?
The biggest problem with the movie, though, is that Jason Alexander is horribly, insanely miscast as Hal's roommate. Alexander's character is supposed to be a guy who ditches an incredibly beautiful, supermodel-quality girlfriend simply because one of her toes is too long. No, no, no, no, no. Alexander's character should have been played by some good-looking smug prick like Ben Affleck, the kind of guy who actually could score a good-looking girlfriend and not care about tossing her aside for some trivial shortcoming.
The entire movie has a "first-draft" feel to it. Jack Black, who plays Hal, is the kind of actor one normally finds on bad sitcoms that are cancelled after three weeks. There is something indefinably Jim Belushi/Tom Arnold about the guy.
Gwyneth Paltrow is lovely, as always, but her presence here falls under the "bad career move" category.
The Farrelly Brothers, who directed and cowrote "Shallow Hal," continue a real downward slide. (Earlier this year, they were two of the directors of the absolutely awful "Osmosis Jones." Before that, they produced the gratingly unamusing "Say It Isn't So.") Maybe "There's Something About Mary" was a fluke.
Most damning of all, "Shallow Hal" contains no nudity whatsoever, and absolutely none of the gross-out comedy that ticket-buyers will be expecting from these creators. (Don't expect anything on the level of "Mary"'s classic Ben Stiller stuck-zipper or "hair gel" scenes, for example.) To today's after-school audience, that probably means "shallow" box-office prospects indeed.
Back Row Grade: D (instead of an "F" merely because I am such a fan of the ga-ga-ga great-looking Gwyneth, which I suppose makes ME shallow)
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