Review of The Sweetest Thing (2002) by Timothy S — 24 Aug 2014

The glut of raucous adult comedies that surfaced in the wake of "There's Something About Mary" were mostly insufferable and unbearable, but there are moments in "The Sweetest Thing" that take the genre down even farther. I guess since this stars three women, it was seen as an alternative to male dominated comedies but it is only more of the same.

In fact, in a lot of ways, this is even worse. The scene in the gas station men's room is disgusting, and the apparently improvised "penis song" in the Chinese restaurant is bizarre, distasteful and painfully unfunny. It's possible that we'll never know what attracted the enormously engaging Christina Applegate and "Mary" alumnus Cameron Diaz to this wretched project, but it was doomed to fail right from the script level.

It's basically a collection of vulgar skits strung together by the barest of plot with some sort of message thrown in about Diaz finally learning about true love. The problem with the message is that it's hard to get behind her allegedly comic quest for true love when you stop to consider how brief her initial encounter with Thomas Jane is. It hardly seems like enough to hang this romantic comedy on, but the filmmakers try nevertheless.

There's not one likable character in this entire film, which at the core is really the reason this fails as badly as it does. It's also embarrassing watching it struggle to get laughs and come up short every single time. "The Sweetest Thing" takes the viewer down some dark roads all in the name of comedy, and we suffer for it every step of the way.