Review of My Mom's New Boyfriend (2008) by Danielle S — 28 Jun 2008

Instead of packing her son up for college, as the film opens the overweight (cue the questionably tasteless fat suit), perpetually junk food eating, soda drinking and cigarette smoking clingy mother Martha Durand (Meg Ryan) bids her ambitious, devoted son Henry (Colin Hanks) farewell for his new, top secret work with the F.

B.I. Having lost a husband who'd perished in jail, our first clue that old Martha likes herself a bad boy, she's devastated to lose her surrogate "man," but even more shocked when she's mistaken for a bum by a passerby so, urged to change her ways and make a second start, she makes a fortune in stocks, slims down to a sexy model stature from her two-hundred fifty plus pound size, buys herself some silicone implants, and renames herself Marty.

Ditching her old frumpy Martha persona, the choice of a masculine name for our leading lady isn't lost on astute viewers as Henry returns three years later to discover his mom is acting like a twentysomething frat-boy gone wild-- bed and motorcycle hopping at will, with an Italian chef serenading her nightly on her front lawn to dating a boy who drinks milk straight from the carton and leaves Marty's place just in time to make it to his finals.

Predictably, Henry's alarmed to discover this new version of Marty as basically a one-dimensional Cosmopolitan Magazine cover come to life and it throws their relationship completely out of whack when not only Henry introduces his mom to his F.

B.I. psychological profiling colleague fiancé Emily (Selma Blair) but soon after, Marty meets cute with an ultimate bad-boy in the form of mysterious, probable international art thief Tommy (Antonio Banderas).

For simply the sake of the preposterous plot instead of any actual logic, Henry is assigned the task of staking out his mother without her knowledge, bugging her home and keeping tabs on her new love.

My Mom's New Boyfriend has its hands full dealing with Marty and Henry's flat-out creepy relationship. So paranoid is Henry about seeing his mom with another man and having dominance in her life, the character's personality skedaddles way past being just an uptight G-man and into ickier territory usually reserved for Jerry Springer's show.

It doesn't help that Hanks doesn't seem to be having the least bit fun or that Meg Ryan delivers a painfully over-the-top turn as Marty. Faring better are Banderas and Selma Blair, who, as Henry's fiance, has absolutely no purpose in the story except to show off how great she looks in lingere.

There's a light twist at the end so everybody can be happy.