There is a moment in The Other Woman in which Leslie Mann and Cameron Diaz, playing a wife and her husband’s former mistress — now friends — fall into a hedge together. When they’re spotted, there’s a little bit of physical business that’s legitimately funny. If you can ignore the fact that the moments of this kind scattered through the film are decorating such a conceptually odious, stupid-to-the-bone enterprise, some of them may make you laugh.
But it may also occur to you just how bad — how bad — it is that this is what we have to offer Mann and Diaz, who show themselves in these moments to be really able comic actresses: a story in which they play idiots with no interests of any kind except bickering over an utterly charmless man and then satisfying themselves that giving him explosive diarrhea and prominent nipples constitutes satisfying revenge for his having apparently robbed both of them of whatever souls and outside interests they once possessed.
It is the most grotesque pantomime of girl power, these beautiful women clinking glasses and ultimately trading what must be the weakest and least earned high-five in cinema history after executing a plot made possible by one of their daddies and done with considerably more panache in the painfully generic but at least mildly agreeable 1987 Michael J. Fox film The Secret of My Success.
When we first meet them, both Kate (Mann) and Carly (Diaz) believe they are happy women, because they are both under the spell, such as it is, of Mark (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), a man with all the inscrutable charisma of a tennis ball with a face drawn on it. Kate babbles at him and pees in front of him and doesn’t know she should groom her intimate areas, because that’s how wives are, right? Carly has wine with him at sundown and has lots of impetuous sex with him and talks to her secretary (Nicki Minaj) about him, because that’s how lady lawyer mistresses are, right?
(As a side note, while the need to advertise the themes of competitive pettiness is understandable, it seems like a dreadful missed opportunity that they didn’t call this Right, Fellas?: The Movie. Someone in marketing was not keeping his [probably his] eye on the ball.)