The Other Woman

The Other Woman stars Cameron Diaz an attractive, high-powered New York Lawyer (we know that’s her job because she spends a lot of time in her fancy office, not because we ever see her working) who discovers that she is “the other woman,” when she accidentally meets the wife of the seemingly ideal man she’s been dating. Leslie Mann plays the wife who, despite being devastated by the knowledge that her husband has been cheating on her, decides to team up with Diaz to get revenge on the man who's wronged them both. It’s a promising premise for a screwball buddy comedy, a rom-com revenge picture, and a feminist farce, but alas it is none of those things. Though Diaz and Mann are enjoyable to watch and they certainly try hard to put the picture over (Mann tries too hard), the shallow comedy and compulsory plot mechanics are labored, unfunny, and misogynistic.  This is yet another example of a pseudo-female-empowerment movie that pretends to emancipate its women from outdated Hollywood gender clichés, but ends up reinforcing these very stereotypes and making all the characters look stupid. It’s a chick-flick that even women who have no problem referring to themselves as “chicks” will find difficult to embrace. Despite the mid-picture addition of Kate Upton and an amusing supporting performance by rapper Nicki Minaj as Diaz’s assistant, I can recall no single scene in which these characters discuss anything but the men who define their lives. The Other Woman is literally a movie about women, for women, written and produced by women, that fails the Bechdel Test--rather unbelievable and disgraceful.