Back
Comedies are getting old. I have to admit that because no one else will. “Along Came Polly” is about Rueben Feffer (Ben Stiller), a stress analyst who catches his new bride (Debra Messing) cheating on him on their honeymoon. He leaves her, goes home a broken man, and tries to start anew. When Reuben is invited to an art gallery viewing by his friend, played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman, he meets a waitress named Polly Prince (Jennifer Aniston). They inadvertently become friends, which leads to a relationship.
Because Feffer is a stress analyst, he knows the probability of bad things happening in usual and safe places. This is played for laughs, but rarely gets any from me. It becomes the same old thing: his personality. He actually gets annoying rather than funnier. The contrast to Feffer is Polly. She’s a go-getter; a woman who does nothing but enjoys life to the fullest by doing crazy (and, as Reuben sees it, unsafe) things. Their relationship is the plot of the story.
The supporting cast is okay. Alec Baldwin is Reuben’s boss, who is kind of a sleaze ball (in one scene, he has a conversation with Reuben at a urinal and then rubs his ear after zipping up his pants). Baldwin is unfunny, and tries way too hard to be the contrary.
I think the only truly funny character is Reuben’s friend. Hoffman plays him with utter hilarity and usually affective gags. He enters the film by slipping on a wax floor, and breezes through the rest by playing basketball (really funny), stealing the lead of a play (pretty funny), and saying great lines (explosively funny).
Ben Stiller has been in a large number of movies over the last two years. Okay, he’s been in too many. Most of them are not funny, and neither is this one. Not very funny anyway. Stiller accidentally made himself a target for getting made fun of with “There’s Something About Mary”, and furthered that cause in “Meet the Parents”. Now he’s just asking for it.
“Along Came Polly” is another one of those comedies that has nothing extremely memorable in it. Phillip Seymour Hoffman is the only saving grace because of his versatility, but he isn’t featured enough to save it. **