Shallow Hal | Review

Here we go again with the highly original moral story about the importance of a person’s inner beauty versus society’s desire for physical attractiveness. This newest attack from the mainstream is brought to you by the Farrelly brothers, experts in field of gross-out humor and ridiculously stereotyped character portrayals. Their latest effort-Shallow Hal is not the story about some freak, but rather a T and A guy who radically changes his view on women thanks to the powerful words by yours truly, and my favorite 2:00 a.m. television figure- Anthony Robbins. Now insert plenty of fat-people jokes, the predicable from-miles-away narrative set-up and we have yet, another tiresome, wait-until-the-next-boring-gag /punch line film comedy. In my case a Farrelly film is a hard sell, so it didn’t help that I wasn’t sold on the idea of upcoming star Jack Black (High Fidelity) as the main vehicle of this film, he seemed to miss some of the panache that the role called for- he remains mildly entertaining through-out the film the interest level is kept at a par with Gwyneth show-me-some-skin Paltrow (Shakespeare in Love) and Jason George Kastanza Alexander (The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle).

The entire balance of the film sits on this mixture of the sentimental and the gross that doesn’t really work well and suffers from what I would call the trying too hard syndrome. With the recent flooded film market of grotesque-gag knock-offs, the Farrelly’s possibly decided that a change (a commendable decision) from the routine and an exploration into a lighter PG-rating comedy was the route to follow, but unfortunately for them- the regular shtick is what they do best. Shallow Hal seems more like a toned-down diet-cola version of a comedy film. The end result is a dry film-very few laughs and a rather sappy feel to it. With all the copycats of this genre of comedy, it may become increasingly harder to come up with another smash hit, as the original There’s Something About Mary.

Rating 0.5 stars