Heartbreakers (2001) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

I re-watched Heartbreakers on DVD, and found myself liking it a lot more the second time around. While it isn't brimming over with originality, it is fairly funny in general, and Ray Liotta is very funny. It seems to me that Liotta is one of those guys who could be another Leslie Nielsen - kind of a run-of-the-mill performer in dramas who could find a niche as a comic performer late in his career. 

In fact, Liotta is also very good in Blow as a nice guy, and wasn't bad as Sinatra in The Rat Pack, which leads us to an overwhelming question. If he's so good in comedies and musicals and as a nice guy, why has he spent his entire life playing low-rent thugs? Answer: he did it once or twice, it worked, and Hollywood didn't let him walk away from it to show that he could do other things.

The same trend toward age polarization can be found in the general public's reaction: 

IMDb, people aged 30-44, say 6.2 (about like two and a half stars)

IMDb, people aged 0-18, say 7.5 (about like three and a half stars)

It's a comedy about mother/daughter con artists. The usual scam goes like this: mom marries the rich guy, then daughter seduces him in a place where mom can catch them in flagrante. That would be Flagrante, Florida, not Flagrante, Italy. Divorce. Payoff. Next victim. 

The daughter wants out, wants to go off on her own, but finds that she isn't hard enough to be a professional con artist, and falls in love. 

On the one hand

• The scams weren't extraordinarily clever or deceptive, the jokes were too far apart for my taste, and the comic timing wasn't always great. Neither Sigourney nor Love is an especially great comic performer, but neither did they embarrass themselves, and the audience seemed to have a good time when I saw it this spring in the theater.

• The scene transitions were clumsy. It is still about two hours long, but it must have been a much longer movie that suffered nearly a half-hour of trimming, possibly at the last minute.

On the other hand

• The two women looked spectacular

• And I love the way Liotta goes fishing. Reminds me of a comic bit I wrote but never used, for our show back in the 80's, where two guys from the New York mob are trying to pose as locals in a Texas county fair, and have to participate in a hog-calling contest. Instead of shouting "soo-eee", they cock their guns and say calmly but threateningly, "hey, ya fokkin pig, get da fock ova heah". Later, we see them wearing their hog-calling blue ribbons.