By any measure two of Hollywood’s more talented specimens, Ben Stiller (Flirting With Disaster, Zoolander) and Jennifer Aniston (er, Friends) have taken it into their heads to waste time on this hopelesly lame-brained romantic comedy, a thorough squandering of the considerable comic talent and general ability both have to offer.
Typically trite and predictable, but by no means the worst chick-flick you’ll ever set eyes on, Along Came Polly stars Stiller as a nerdy, straight-laced ‘risk assessment analyst’ whose general demeanour puts the ‘anal’ in analyst. While on honeymoon with his new wife (Debra Messing) on an exotic beach, he leaves her alone with a musclebound French nudist for a few minutes and returns to find them frantically fucking: broken-hearted, the poor sod dumps her and then mopes around looking suitably miserable and stricken for an age, until he stumbles across the path of the idiotically-named Polly Prince (Aniston), a hippy-drippy ‘kook chick’ (yuk!) who laughs like a donkey, eats with her hands and is otherwise devoid of any interesting features whatsoever.
A tedious romance then unfolds slowly and painfully before our eyes, much in the manner of most bog-standard Hollywood rom-coms. Both leads do their level best to lift Along Came Polly out of the murk, but there isn’t enough life in the script for them to work with. The central gag is that Aniston’s character is too wild and spontaneous to be compatible with Stiller’s neurotic order freak, but in truth, both are so boring you wouldn’t care to be stuck in a lift with either.
Even a Philip Seymour-Hoffman cameo, though funnier than anything else the film has to offer, has to register as something of a blotch on his excellent CV. Otherwise, Along Came Polly is content to resort to such hilarious comic novelties as curry-related attacks of diarrhoea, blocked toilets and fat men shitting themselves in public. Despite its reasonable box-office progress Stateside, this affair is best forgotten by all parties as quickly as possible.