As a light romantic-comedy caper flick, this succeeds on only one level: it's light.
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Writer-director George Gallo says that "My Mom's New Boyfriend" is a homage to the caper films he loved while growing up, from tongue-in-cheek romantic comedies like "To Catch a Thief" to just plain cheeky romps like "The Pink Panther." But maybe he should have picked just one style to emulate, because this 2008 film has neither the classy charm and suspense of that Cary Grant-Grace Kelly film, nor the laughs that those Peter Sellers films delivered. It gets caught in a kind of bland limboland where good actors meet lackluster scripts.
If you deconstruct this film mentally and just isolate single performers, you'll see that two of the headliners do a decent job with their roles. But, not surprisingly, the two who pull it off have the better parts. Antonio Banderas even has a few Grant moments as Tommy, an international art thief whom we see at the outset getting trapped inside a glass museum display case because of his two bumbling sidekicks (Thomas Joseph Adams, Tom Adams). Meg Ryan, despite some rather off-putting plastic surgery to stave off aging, is her usual flamboyant self as Marty Durand, whom we see in the opening sequences in a fat suit looking and behaving like the worst sort of trailer trash imaginable. How she has a doting son who's a suit-wearing, Dragnet-behaving FBI agent just boggles the mind, since fruit isn't supposed to fall far from the tree. But fast forward three years, as we do in this film, and art thief Tommy is miraculously free to resume pursuit of a statue that has preoccupied him for the past seven years, and Marty is back in the slender hard body of Meg Ryan.
Gallo ("Code Name: The Cleaner") vacillates between hitting us with too much information or else leaving big gaps in the plot that leave even bigger holes in whatever logic is holding this thing together. And the attempt at comedy doesn't just fall flat: it's so bad you want to help it fall.
For one thing, if field agent Henry Durand (Colin Hanks) is as doting of a son and as connected to her as the opening sequence establishes, then how is it that he's surprised when he pops in to see her years later as a slender, attractive woman? Why didn't he visit sooner? You don't go from fat to flat in a matter of months. They appeared to be close, so why the sudden distance? Mom hasn't only just gotten thin, either. She's turned a bit slutty with her newfound shape and Hedonistic philosophy, which has led her to date a number of men. Among them are an Italian chef who shows up in the middle of the night and stands in the street shouting his devotion to her, and a twentysomething motorcyle-riding boy toy who calls Henry "Dude." Apart from running gags over wiretapping agents who seem easily amused/arounsed by the romantic interludes of the suspects, that's the extent of the humor. Henry, meanwhile, announces to Mom that he's engaged, and though Emily (Selma Blair), another field agent, seems as bland and by-the-book as Henry, she sides inexplicably with Marty when it comes to her outrageous sexual behavior, or to ask him, while they're in bed, "Do you ever think of your mom while we're having sex?" That leaves poor Colin Hanks to attempt what Dad does best: reaction shots. At this stage in his acting career, Colin is probably where Tom Hanks was when he was doing "Bosom Buddies." He just doesn't have the range and depth of facial expression, yet, to make a dull and stiff character like this come more to life. But you can't fault him. Blair can't do much with her role, either, with some of her lines seeming like Mrs. Roper ones, as when Henry complains of his motorcycle-riding mom, "She's out riding somebody's beast," and Emily deadpans, "At least somebody is." They're both minor characters, really, masquerading as major ones, and that's Gallo's fault, not the actors.
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[release]24053[/release]