The heartbreak kid

SINCE the staggering success of There's Something About Mary, the Farrellys' work has shown evidence of an ongoing struggle between potty humour and a worrying desire for quasi- respectability. Stuck on You and Shallow Hal may have featured, respectively, conjoined twins and an enormous Paltrow, but both films were, at heart, gooily sentimental and cosily conventional.

With this in mind, readers may be concerned about the team's decision to take a 1972 Elaine May comedy as the inspiration for their latest comedy. The Heartbreak Kid, scripted by

the never particularly radical Neil Simon, followed a Jewish sporting goods salesman, recently married to a plain, local girl, as he fell in love with a glamorous blonde while on his honeymoon. It's a film that doesn't appear to offer much scope for recreational revulsion.

As it happens, the new picture, though deeply flawed, turns out to be the directors' best in years. This time round, mindful of the misogynistic flavours in Simon's original script, the Farrellys allow the first wife to be impossibly glamorous and irrepressibly lively.

After assisting Lila (Malin Akerman) following an apparent mugging, Eddie (Ben Stiller), a shy man with commitment issues, starts a relationship with the blonde kook and, rushed into a decision by events, elects to marry her. Within minutes of their setting off on honeymoon,

it becomes clear that she is a fruitcake of unusual proportions: she insists upon insanely contorted sex; food travels up and down her deviated septum; she uses mineral water as sun-block.

When the last activity leaves her blistered and aching, Eddie is set free for the day and encounters another, less deranged young woman (Michelle Monaghan), who is holidaying with her conservative southern family.

As is often the case with these film-makers, the comedy is at its best when at its most stupid. The scenes where Eddie has to deal with Lila's catapulting madness are riotously funny, but the romance with the nicer Miranda is conspicuously short on broad gags. As the end of the story looms, the Farrellys' unwanted better nature wrestles control of the machine and redirects us towards respectability.

Never fear. There are enough disgusting detours along the way to make the journey worthwhile.

DONALD CLARKE