Shallow Hal (2001)
Review by HTQ4
Film:
DVD:

Written by Sean Moynihan, Peter Farrelly & Bobby Farrelly
Directed by Bobby Farrelly & Peter Farrelly

Starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Jack Black, Jason Alexander, Joe Viterelli, Tony Robbins
Features:

• Running audio commentary by the Brothers Farrelly
  
• 11 deleted scenes with optional commentary
  
• HBO "Making Of" special
  
• Comedy Central's Reel Comedy: Shallow Hal
  
• Music Video: "Wall in your Heart" by Shelby Lynne
  
• "Seeing Through the Layers" makeup featurette
  
• "In At The Deep End With Shallow Hall" stunts featurette
  
• Original theatrical trailer
  

Hal Larson (Black) is a guy with a problem: He's shallow (hence the name of the movie, natch). He only sees girls for their exterior beauty and not for their inner beauty. One fateful day, Hal gets trapped in an elevator with self-help guru Tony Robbins (playing himself) and Tony hypnotizes Hal to help him turn this around. Hal immediately starts finding these amazingly attractive women. Not only do they fall all over him, but they have no idea how to react when he asks them if they would like to go out with him. His buddy, Mauricio (Alexander) is desperately trying to help his shallow buddy to see what he's doing to himself by dating these amazingly ugly women. Hal then falls in love with a internally beautiful woman named Rosemary (Paltrow) who also happens to be Hal's boss' boss. She falls in love with him right back and everything seems to be okay with the world until Mauricio steps in to bail his buddy out.

Anyone with any amount of foresight can see where this movie is going to go from one minute to the next. It's a very bland script with some really funny actors going through the motions. Black is charmingly stupid and masculine in his role of Hal, and he has some nice moments where you really see him connecting with his fellow actors. However, for the most part, he was completely disconnected from the film. Paltrow felt like she was wading in very shallow (pardon the pun) water by taking on this script. She seemed to be trying too hard with Rosemary. I honestly think that she was reading a little much into the script, which was floating somewhere just above the surface of what many people believe to be a much deeper subject. Alexander was completely out of his depth. In most of his roles (even the ones that are similar to this one), he eases into them naturally, but he, too, seemed to be trying too hard to be "the insensitive guy friend who doesn't get what his friend is going through" character. Some of the jokes in the script seem to come completely from left field and the payoff for some of the setups are so weak as to really piss you off. And that's if you're lucky: most of the setups didn't seem to pay off at all. The story is predictable and the characters are two dimensional. Add all that to the fact that the script is only moderately funny and you've got a mediocre movie at best.

The DVD treatment is pretty good; starting off is the commentary track. It's pretty tongue in cheek, and, for the most part, just shows how the Farrelly brothers want to come across as shallow themselves. The deleted scenes (which you can watch with or without commentary) show you that sometimes it's quite obvious why the victims of the editor's snips were cut from the final release. Then you have the "Reel Comedy" segment from Comedy Central, which is nothing to write home about (although, aren't I writing home about it now?). Black, Paltrow and company basically spend the better part of twenty-two minutes telling you the plot of the film and, every now and again, throwing you little bones of information from the set. But, they do it with that "Oh, this is Comedy Central, so I'm supposed to be funny the whole time" mentality that really gets annoying.

The Make-up special is pretty cool if for no other reason than to see how much actually went into making all these externally beautiful people internally beautiful. For some reason, they thought it necessary to put a ten minute special effects segment on the DVD that deals with the Rosemary Cannonball bit in the movie. I guess that's because the scene dominated the trailers. It's too short to give you any depth into the creation of the effect; it's mostly just on-the-set footage with a couple of interviews thrown in. I've never been a fan of music videos as bonus features on DVDs and this one is no different, but they also add insult to sonic injury with a 30 second "Buy the Soundtrack" commercial thrown in as well. Joy. Also I'd like to state that I have no idea who chooses which trailers get put on these DVDs, but they don't seem to even hit the same demographics as the main feature. Consider--Farrelly Brothers fans, go check out Unfaithful and The Banger Sisters, why dontcha? Um...kay.

Pick up the DVD as something to throw in the DVD player for a date, but I wouldn't put it on the shelf permanently.