Larger text
Smaller text
Print
E-mail
Low-brow humor doesn't help shallow comedy
Director: Daniel Taplitz
Stars: Jamie Foxx, Peter MacNicol, Gabrielle Union
MPAA rating: PG-13 for sexual material/humor and language
A senile elderly man with a hangdog expression repeatedly encourages sexual favors from a 20-something nurse who, for reasons best known to writer-director Daniel Taplitz, goes right on positioning herself beside the man on his bed.
But then, the nurse, Nicky (Gabrielle Union), can't be thinking clearly or she wouldn't be dithering about the suitors in her life, Evan (Morris Chestnut) or his cousin Quincy (Jamie Foxx), who sometimes is called Q, just like Quincy Jones.
Quincy, the film's central character, is busily brushing off Helen (Bianca Lawson).
He's the editor of Spoil magazine, run by nerdy, cowardly publisher Phillip (Peter MacNicol), who not only expects Quincy to develop strategies for firing 15 percent of the staff but then to do the firing, too.
Quincy quits to write a bestseller, "The Break-Up Handbook," which everyone uses as a primer to dump one party while manipulating another into an affair.
Amy (Jill Ritchie) is a meddling nurse, Rita (Jennifer Esposito) a predatory control freak.
Exhibiting a fundamental lack of respect for each other and seldom differentiating love from lust, the film's shallow people play tricks on even shallower people.
Such machinations can be informative, entertaining and even intriguing ("Les Liaisons Dangereuses"), but "Breakin' All the Rules" operates at the level of its overage children. The characters deserve each other.
The trouble is, the film means that as a compliment.
But then, this is in a movie in which the picture concurs with Quincy's assertion, "Love doesn't care about (honesty) one way or the other. It cares about itself."
It's probably something he read -- wrote -- in "The Break-Up Handbook."
