After viewing Triple X a couple of weeks ago and Serving Sara this week, I'm beginning to suspect that Hollywood, perhaps in an effort to save money in our struggling economy, is secretly hiring fourth-grade boys to write all their scripts. I thought no one could pen lines more pre-adolescent than Vin Diesel's coolest-kid-in-the-elementary-school insults, but Serving Sara's authors were more than up to the challenge. You tell me -- does the following piece of opening dialogue sound like it could have come from the playground or not: --"Kiss my butt." --"I can't, my lips aren't big enough." I kept waiting for all the other characters to turn around and say "oooh, burn!" I promise you -- it doesn't get any more mature, and it gets a lot more vulgar, throughout the rest of the movie.

Truly, Serving Sara was such a silly waste of time, I hardly feel compelled to analyze it. But to provide some frame of reference for your date-night movie choices, here's the basic plot: a spoiled, trophy wife (Elizabeth Hurley) finds she has become "the older model" to her Texas husband and is served divorce papers by processor Matthew Perry. After she offers him one-million dollars, Perry agrees to set aside her papers and serve her husband first so that she can get a better divorce settlement. Naturally, there are several bad guys out to foil their plan, and I'm sure we can all guess how, after plenty of banjo-scored hijinks, everything turns out.

I had high hopes for this film, and its kind of a shame because the premise seems to have a lot of slapstick potential. Unfortunately, Serving Sara boasts nothing, including Matthew Perry, that can save it from a late-night Comedy Central fate. Both Perry and Hurley phone in their performances--although I should say Hurley appears to relish her "white trash" costumes (their words, not mine) in a particularly wriggly way. I suppose I can't lay all the blame for this disaster at her or Matthew Perry's feet, considering they had absolutely no quality material to work with. However, while I may not be able to question their acting abilities, I can certainly question their judgment. With a script that goes for the cheap laugh and predictable outcome at every turn, I'd rather stay home and watch "Friends".

Year of Release -- 2002