David Ronn and Jay Scherick are collaborative writers who have worked on projects like I Spy, National Security and the incomparable Norbit. There are good chances if I tell you that Serving Sara is also from their stable that you might not finish reading the review. Oops! So you get my drift.
Mathew Perry plays Joe who works as a legal notice server. His boss tends to think that Joe's colleague Tony (Vincent Pastore) is a far better worker than Joe so he assigns one last job to Joe to prove his worth. The job is to serve a divorce notice on Sara (Elizabeth Hurley) which sets Joe off on a series of (mis)adventures that eventually lead him to accomplishing the task. You can throw in a couple of cliches that will happen in a storyline like this and you would've got the plot of Serving Sara hook, line and sinker.
The movie opens in a convincing manner in which Joe is seen serving a notice on a mafia boss- the disappointing bit was that those opening five minutes are the only minutes worth anything in the movie. That's of course, if you set aside Elizabeth Hurley's dazzling looks in the film. Mind you, I said looks not acting. I am not sure if it's already too late for Mathew Perry in Hollywood but a man of such talent needs to start doing better roles in better movies. At 50, he might be standing at the cusp of a revival of his acting fortunes on the silver screen and he will do well to pick and choose his roles from here on.
Serving Sara is disappointing because it's yet another cliched romantic comedy. A cliche might still work if it has some good comic gags to go along with it. The movie fails terribly on that count too. Right now, I am thinking of one good reason why I could recommend this movie to you. It'll be a long wait, I guess. Oh wait, I got one- maybe if you're a die-hard fan of either Perry or Hurley. A fan so desperate you wouldn't mind your epitaph reading: 'Died while appreciating the subtler nuances of filmmaking in the iconic Serving Sara which included Mathew Perry putting his hand in a cow's arse even as Elizabeth Hurley walked around in a nice mini-skirt at a Texan ranch.'
Rating: 3.1/10
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