The Sweetest Thing

Image credit: Amazon

Ah, those moments when you make the, sometimes, catastrophic decision to revisit those ‘raunchier’ comedies of your youth. Remember those days when you thought any MA movie was totally sexy and brilliant because you were fifteen and didn’t know any better? I did this the other night, and oh man did I used to watch some crappy rom-coms!

The Sweetest Thing tells the story of irresistible playgirl Christina (Cameron Diaz) whose game is to enjoy the attraction and fun of the early part of relationships and then bailing before things get serious. But that changes when she meets Peter who somehow manages to get under her skin, enough to make her travel across the country to attend his brother’s wedding. After a load of mishaps and misadventures she arrives to discover it’s the wedding she thought it was and along the way she learns some hard truths about herself.

What I used to find amusing about this movie has completely vanished with time and becoming more of a seasoned movie-watcher. What is left now is outdated ‘philosophies’ about romance and dating, very lazy and unfinished writing, and a bunch of boring two-dimensional characters.

There really is no story to go on and the central ‘humour’ comes in the form of crudities and sex jokes, including an entire musical number about penises for absolutely no reason. But my major problem with this film is there is seemingly to point to the characters. 

Image credit: Zig

Aside from a few clumsy hints, there is no back-story given as to what happened to these girls to make them live a life of club-hopping and perpetual game playing. I think it maybe is meant to be some sort of gender reversal of the whole eligible bachelor, Casanova type thing, but it really just doesn’t work and even a random ‘movie montage’, which was totally just thrown in so the girls could play dress-ups, cannot bring a shred of integrity or cleverness to this mess of a screenplay.

Their lack of a history makes the characters themselves very boring and, frankly, not worth giving a damn about, which makes the movie even more pointless as the watching-experience is one of complete nonchalance and disinterest.

Nothing clever, nothing entertaining, nothing enlightening, there is absolutely nothing sweet about The Sweetest Thing.

Director: Roger Kumble, 2002

Cast: Cameron Diaz, Christina Applegate, Selma Blair, Thomas Jane, and Jason Bateman