HEARTBREAKERS

Camille Dodero

There's something unsettling about seeing a mother and daughter separately unzip the same guy's fly -- especially when such icky actions become grounds for tagging an unfunny dud like David Mirkin's Heartbreakers a black comedy. Note to MGM: black comedy is not a euphemism for bad comedy.

Max (Sigourney Weaver) and Page (Jennifer Love Hewitt) are a mother-daughter con-artist team who rush moneyed men into abrupt marriages, goad them into infidelity (Page typically seduces Max's new husbands), and then milk the suckers for their bank accounts. Airing their cleavage like catnip, Max and Page first sink their claws into shady, car-repossessing Dean (Ray Liotta). But when Dean's swindled assets don't satiate, the gold-digging shrews relocate to Palm Beach, scope out the mansions, and settle on liver-spotted billionaire William B. Tensy (Gene Hackman). While Max is trying to pull an Anna Nicole Smith and wed Tensy before he croaks, icy Page breaks her conniving character and falls for starry-eyed nice guy Jack (Jason Lee).

Rife with gratuitous ass wiggling, flat characters, and jejune phallicism, Heartbreakers rehashes tricks from a myriad of second- and third-sting flicks. Goonies already broke off a nude statue's third leg, Weekend at Bernie's doled out the rigor mortis jokes, and I Know What You Did Last Summer proved that Love Hewitt has breasts. Unlike its temptable male protagonists, Heartbreakers falls limp.