Along Came Polly

Along Came Polly is a flat, formulaic romantic comedy, sporadically punctuated with entertaining moments – and one hysterical salsa-dancing set-piece. Having co-written Meet the Parents and Zoolander, director John Hamburg knows how to play to the strengths of his star, and he’s penned another bizarrely named character – a risk assessor with Irritable Bowel Syndrome – directly up Ben Stiller’s perpetually clenched alley. But the movie fails to provide any reason why a sexy, free-wheeling girl-next-door, played by Jennifer Aniston, would give the likes of Reuben Feffer a second glance.

Reuben’s job is finding stable, secure, risk-free clients for insurance firms. He’s so anal about statistics he makes personal choices based on the number-crunching software on his laptop, and endures years of presumably enforced bachelorhood, until he finally marries Lisa (Debra Messing). But his talent for sniffing out risky prospects fails him when he catches his wife bunking-up with the hunky French diving instructor (an especially buffed Hank Azaria) on the first day of their honeymoon. Returning to New York dejected and alone, his grotesque best friend, failed child actor Sandy Lyle (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), cajoles him into re-entering the social fray, and he meets a flaky, spicy food-loving bohemian called Polly, who never met a risk she wasn’t up for, and may be able to help him forget his calamitous marriage sooner than he thought.

This is obviously a vehicle for the endearing Stiller, whose bony, oversized head protrudes from a torso seemingly eternally knotted in a tense bodybuilder’s crunch, leaving the impression of a startled turtle peering anxiously from its shell. His hilarious reactions and expressive physicality lend themselves perfectly to physical gags where, inevitably, he ends up being the punchline. One involves a basketball court and a topless man with a sodden back rug. And the riotous scene where Stiller hilariously unveils his secretly acquired salsa-dancing skills, hurling himself around like a spastic John Travolta, is the comedy highlight. These intuitively written sequences – and Reuben’s lecture on the dangers lurking within a bar’s communal nut bowl – are classic Stiller.

Talented character actors like Phillip Seymour Hoffman, as the louche, graceless Sandy, and Alec Baldwin, as a New York Jewish cliché, complete with “dese-dem-dose” accent and oversized glasses, provide flashes of humor, but both are stranded frustratingly in one-note roles. Interestingly, the Thai audience loved Hank Azaria’s nude beach bum, stifling fits of giggles whenever he sauntered into view flouting his deliberately hammy parody of a French accent.

The lack of chemistry between Ben Stiller and Jennifer Aniston seriously undermines proceedings. Aniston’s bosomy cheer and neat comic timing could have worked well – although her harebrained character seems to have co-opted Lisa Kudrow’s Phoebe from Friends. Effort has been put in to giving the nascent relationship some kind of organic quality, but it’s always a losing battle: the characters joust with polar-opposite personalities, lacking common ground and shared interests. Jen and Ben could transcend these setbacks all right with a single, intangible spark of romantic credibility; but their awkward, forced pairing is consistently about as sexy as Woody Allen in Speedos.

Indeed, all Reuben’s associations are similarly implausible. It’s a stretch to accept an uptight germophobe would ever be friends with a louche, unhygenic slob like Sandy – let alone elect him best man at his wedding. The unconvincing script contrivances are distracting: we keep doubting that this person would be acting that way in this situation. Soon enough, you withdraw the thinking part of your brain and just try to enjoy the performances, while wishing they came in a more convincing movie.

Along Came Polly aims to develop the same kind of charming, sweet, crudely funny mélange that made There’s Something About Mary so wildly popular. But this film mostly misses the mark with its clumsy approach to comedy, overstating the obvious and running cheap gags into the ground. Throw in tired reoccurring jokes about gastro-intestinal distress and its associated noises, and a shortsighted ferret that constantly hurtles headfirst into furniture, and you’ve got a movie that sets its comedy bar too low for the talents involved. The needless spectacle of two talented actors desperately grovelling on the toilet floor for laughs is quite pathetic.

Every truly successful romantic comedy has at its heart a couple worth rooting for. This one doesn’t and it never transcends that central miscasting. Consequently, the ultimate payoff of any romantic movie – the inescapable “happily ever after” reunion – falls flat, and by that time we don’t care anyway. Perhaps the filmmakers should’ve concerned themselves a little more with chemistry and less with biology.