America's Sweethearts sells itself on its cast, featuring American sweethearts like Julia Roberts, John Cusack, Billy Crystal and Catherine Zeta-Jones. Sounds like a formula for a good movie, right? Take real life movie stars that are loved by America and put them in a movie about hollywood-types and celebrities and call the movie 'America's Sweethearts.' Great idea, sure, until you go see the movie and realize that it is one of the most unoriginal, uninspired, idiotic scripts ever written. The humor is at best predictable and cliche, at worst deliberate and insulting to my intelligence. Even the funniest character, Christopher Walken's strange miser director, is a ball of over-used cliches about artsy film directors. I could swallow predictability and lame jokes if for one second I cared about one single freakin' character in the movie, but that would be too much to ask. Julia Roberts' character used to be fat, but she's already gone through her transformation before the beginning of the movie, so there's no pain with which to sympathize. John Cusack's character is supposed to be connecting to himself and you're supposed to be happy for him, but in flashbacks it seems like he was always pretty OK. There is other stuff that really irritated me in this movie - one example is Catherine Zeta-Jones' "Spaniard" boyfriend, who is the dumbest melting pot of misplaced stereotypes of Puerto Ricans I've seen on screen in awhile and would've offended me if I thought for the one second that the writer (Billy Crystal...wasn't he funny when I was a little kid?) actually cared the slightest bit about his movie and his characters, but I know (pray) that couldn't be true.
Review of America's Sweethearts
