There's nothing at all to be gained from 'Serving Sara'
"Serving Sara" is such a miserable excuse for a movie that the constant ringing of a cellphone at its preview screening served only to improve it. Could this be Elizabeth Hurley, I wondered, calling to offer apologies for her participation in this travesty, pleading that single moms need all the work they can get? Or perhaps Matthew Perry, explaining that earning untold millions from "Friends" isn't enough — his dream was always to make a movie that required him to don a large rubber glove and do something nasty to a bull? Or a red-faced executive from Paramount Pictures, saying that it was all a big mistake and we could leave now?
Alas, I never did find out who was on that ever-ringing line, but I envied the caller — he or she, at least, wasn't having to sit through the movie. In it, Perry plays Joe, a spiky-haired process server who dreams of becoming a winemaker someday. As the prospects for vintners in midtown Manhattan are somewhat limited, he makes a living hunting down those who do not wish to be found, and handing them court papers.
Among those is Sara (Hurley), the soon-to-be-divorced wife of a wealthy cattle rancher. Sara and Joe eventually team up, for reasons far too tiresome to go into here, and off we go to Texas for numerous unfunny shenanigans.
Hurley, who's got cheekbones you could cut out paper dolls with, earns her paycheck by tossing her hair around a lot and flouncing around in a teeny miniskirt. But she and Perry both seem like they're somewhere else; their chemistry is so nonexistent it's as if they shot the film on separate continents. And they're not helped by a screenplay that seems to have been made up on the fly. At one point, Joe and Sara kiss in a hotel room — with about the same enthusiasm that Perry brought to the bull encounter — and break apart, with Sara saying urgently that their priority now must be to find her husband. Then she goes off and takes a nice long bath.
There's nothing funny in this would-be comedy, and director Reginald Hudlin seems to know it — he resorts to desperate tricks, like cutting to reaction shots of Hurley laughing when Perry says a line. As for the movie's physical humor, here's a sample: Hurley, fleeing a thug at an airport, runs through the check-in portal of the luggage conveyer belt and squeals as she goes down the chute. Perry goes after her, and a terrible calamity happens, causing him to rip off a leg of her designer jeans. Oh no! Elizabeth Hurley with a leg exposed? How can this be?
"Serving Sara," which feels astonishingly long at 100 minutes, is dreck. As Joe and Sara headed off to the cattle ranch, aided by such sparkling dialogue as "Oh, get a mute button for yourself," I slumped in my seat. In the darkness, the cellphone rang again. Maybe it's Hudlin, I thought, saying he was forced to make the movie at gunpoint. Maybe Katharine Hepburn, calling to say that screwball isn't really dead. Maybe it's. ... But it just kept on ringing.
Moira Macdonald: mmacdonald@seattletimes.com
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