Summary
A single mother (Anna Faris, “Observe and Report”), barely scraping by on her best of days, loses her cleaning job after a carpet cleaning gone bad for a stuck up billionaire playboy with his best years behind him (Eugenio Derbez, “Geostorm”). When she hears that he has had an amnesia inducing accident, she convinces him that she is is wife and forces him to work in construction and care for her three kids as she finishes her last month in nurse’s school.
Really???
So among the sentences I thought I would never find myself writing, is the next one.
I liked the remake of "Overboard.”
I know. I can't believe it either.
The Bad
Don’t get me wrong. This is NOT a great movie. It has so many things going against it. It’s a remake. It has Anna Faris (an actress whose personality I find likable but whose humor I don’t). Eugenio Derbez is an unknown to me. I mean, I’ve never seen any of his films. I work at a video store so I see how much the Spanish speaking clientele love his movies but they always looked silly to me.
This one is no exception. This is a silly movie. The setup is silly. The acting is silly. The climax of the film is silly. I only really laughed in the last 15 minutes of the film. The 2nd act is a mess and boring.
And yet…
There is something really sweet about this film, so please bear with me as I try to put my finger on why I liked a film that I went into, expecting to hate.
Eugenio Derbez
Definitely, one of the things this movie had going for it was the lead actor. Make no mistake, this is his film. Anna Faris is playing a hard second fiddle to a man who not only has serious comedic chops, but acting as well.
The setup of the film requires you to buy into the idea that this billionaire he is playing, really deserves to be taken advantage of in a pretty incredible way. You have to hate him a lot to think that someone could be justified in letting him not only languish in an amnesiac limbo, but also, essentially enslave him for a month.
Derbez does a great job here. It would have been easy for him to be so cartoonish that the performance just seemed ham fisted. It was have been easy to make him so harsh that the movie stopped feeling fun. The balance he strikes is perfect.
You can easily imagine that in his younger days, he was the playboy that actually smooth talked the ladies and threw ragers just off the coast, but now? He’s still a party boy, but the girls party with him because he’s rich, not smooth. He should really be growing up, but no one makes him. He is annoyingly stuck up, abusive, and entitled. You totally understand why Anna Faris hates him.
But that’s only one side of him. After he gets amnesia and is duped into playing the husband, no matter how much he is abused, he ends up become an incredibly sympathetic person. He forms genuine attachments to the kids, who he is told are his. He admires Ana Faris for her dedication to her education. He goes the extra mile to make romantic gestures. He does all this, and none of it seems fake. It really is remarkable that he pulls them both off, so well.
In fact, toward the climax of the film he as a scene where his character goes through a whirl of realizations and just as many emotional revelations. This scene is so well acted, especially for a movie that should go on the shelf next to Kevin James classics.
Different kind of Romantic Comedy
One of the reasons I was reluctant to see this movie was that it looked like it would be a low rent version of movies in the “How to Lose a Guy in 10 days - 27 Dresses” vein. What I found instead was a different breed of comedy. It has the feel of a throwback to an older idea of romanticism. If you told me the script was written in the sixties, I wouldn’t be that surprised.
In the end, it isn’t about just infatuation, or falling in love. The new marriage isn’t born out of passion or lust. It is built on the life that they build together. The thing that he misses when asked to leave his new family, is everything. It’s the hard work, the children, the cooking and cleaning, and the parter-ship of having more than just sexy times with another person.
Meta-Humor
Another surprising element in the film, is the meta-humor. I really think this saves some of the sillier moments of the film from being too incredulous. It is quite obvious that the writers have talent and knew what they were working on and up against.
There is a running theme in this film of the telenovela. One of the characters is a huge fan of the Mexican soaps and everyone calls him silly for liking them but he always sticks to his guns, saying, “crazy things happen all the time, even in small towns.” He points out peoples eccentricities and compares them to the soaps, and the crew on the yacht kibitz through security cameras on the rich family working out their insane problems through these crazy antics.
The movie is surprisingly aware of how stupid the premise of the plot is and just says, “Hey, crazy stuff happens. We know it’s dumb but try to have fun.” And I did.
Bringing it Back Down
I’d love to say that this movie completely wins me over because of these things but it doesn’t. The middle is still pretty boring, Ana Faris’ character doesn’t have much agency, and it really pulls its punches with the message even, bestowing millions of dollars on the family after he made the choice to abandon his riches. Some of the jokes are too on the nose for my liking.
It so ALMOST makes it into the category of movies I can whole-heartedly recommend, but not quite. Many audiences will simply find it too silly.
The Verdict
For many though, who long for some of the wackier, family oriented comedies, not just about a couple falling in love, but about a family finding joy in each other, I would definitely recommend “Overboard.” There is hardly any sexual joking and what there is, is more implied than said.
In fact, I wouldn’t mind watching this movie again. I know, it’s a crazy world in which I liked the “Overboard” remake more than Avengers, but that’s the world we live in.
Hey, crazy stuff happens.
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