A crude but amusing romantic comedy

Rating: 7/10 (3 December 2014)

Sixteen year old Ted can't believe his luck when the beautiful Mary invited him to the school prom but things go disastrously when he gets caught in his zipper and ends up in an ambulance rather than going to the prom! Sixteen years later he is still obsessed with Mary even though he hasn't seen her since that dreadful night. His friend Dom says he knows private investigator who can find her; Ted hires the man, Healy, and he soon reports that she is now living in Miami, has four kids by three fathers and looks like a whale only one of these details is true; she is in Miami but she is still beautiful and childless so beautiful in fact that sleazy Healy sets about wooing her. Having eaves-dropped her conversations he presents himself as the perfect man for her. There are problems for Healy though, a friend of Mary sees that he is a fraud and Ted decides that he'd like to see Mary again whatever she looks like.
This is probably not the rom-com to buy your mother for Christmas unless she enjoys jokes about blokes getting their genitals caught is their zips, a woman accidentally using semen as hair gel or dogs being drugged and nearly dying. If that sort of crudeness offends then it is best to avoid this but if not there should be enough laughs to be had. The story itself is standard rom-com fare; boy loves girl but she is in love with the wrong guy it is just that the laughs along the way are often in poor taste but some of those poor taste moments are the films funniest; although dog-lovers may disagree. Ben Stiller does a decent enough job as nice-guy Ted, even if he looked ridiculous when playing him aged sixteen. Cameron Diaz shines as the eponymous Mary but it is Matt Dillon who steals the show as Healy making the sleazy character almost likable due to the shear outrageousness of his actions. Overall if you are looking for some lowbrow humour you could do a lot worse than watch this.