Shallow Hal

How do you make an extremely shallow guy and make him actually lovable? Well, first off you have the Farrelly Brothers direct the movie. Then you get Jack Black to play the guy. Hal (Black) is the most shallow man in the world. He is looking for a perfect woman who is beautiful, thin, interesting and with a great ass. He has such a problem finding that woman (go figure) that everyone around him is starting to think that his standards are set just a tad too high. When he meets Tony Robbins (a self-help guru who looks a little too much like Ben Affleck) in a elevator and pours out his life story, Tony “de-hypnotizes” him so that he saw only the inner-beauty of everyone.

So now he sees all of these beautiful women everywhere and, somehow, he is able to talk to them and they love him. What he doesn’t realize is that no one else is talking to them for a reason. These girls have huge noses and bad teeth hair that’s falling out.

Then he meets Rosemary (Gwyneth Paltrow). She’s perfect. She’s beautiful, witty, cool…everything that Hal wants in a woman. And SO much more. She also happens to weigh about 400 pounds. When Mauricio (Jason Alexander finally getting a good role after Seinfeld was canceled, but he could still probably do better) sees her he tries to save his best friend from a fate that he thinks is worse than death…social unacceptability.

Now, this story has so many chances to be totally offensive. There are so many fat jokes that could have been made and so many times that we could see some of the other characters as just an in to a bunch of really lame lines. There’s a guy with spinal bifida who was always the life of the party and had every reason to love life even though he had to walk on all fours. So, to all of those people who are protesting this movie, Screw You. Watch the movie and then you’ll understand that it’s not insulting at all…just like the rest of the Farrelly’s films.

The performances are pretty much great. Jack walks that thin line between totally shallow and totally cool extremely well. In fact, he comes off as much less shallow than his best friend. Jason Alexander is such a dick that, even when he’s trying to “help” his friend, we think it’s for very selfish reasons.

Even the beautiful girls who play the girls that Hal hits on are great. Even though they’re beautiful, they seem to know exactly how not so pretty girls act when they’re hit on. They’re geeky, awkward and embarrassed as only a girl with a big nose and fucked up teeth can. But they’re hot. Go figure.

In fact, the only performance that doesn’t really measure up is, unfortunately, one of the most important. Gwyneth Paltrow is actually not very good here. Yeah, she looks great (except that fat suit isn’t so good. You can definitely tell it’s a fat suit), but she just seems to be kind of drifting through a lot of the movie. And that’s too bad. She’s got a lot of great lines and physical gags that a better actress could have made really funny.

Overall, though, this was a very fun movie with a good message. Looks are only part of the story. Beautiful women can be hell to get along with (especially if they’re totally vacuous), so find someone who is cool and you’ll find the beautiful no matter what.

Watch for Jack’s Tenacious D partner Kyle Gass and ex-Daily Show correspondent (and Jack’s girlfriend) Laura Kightlinger as Hal’s co-workers.