Film Review: Serving Sara (2002)

“I’ve never experienced such a long silence in cinema theatre since Schindler’s List”. When you hear such description, you may be certain that the film had strong impact. But the news isn’t likely to be good if the film in question is supposed to be a comedy, like in the case of Serving Sara, 2002 film directed by Reginald Hudlin.

Protagonist, played by Matthew Perry, is Joe Tyler, a professional process server. His boss Ray (played by Cedric the Entertainer) offers a very lucrative task – he must serve divorce papers to Sara Moore (played by Elizabeth Hurley), young and attractive wife of Texas tycoon Gordon Moore (played by Bruce Campbell). After many problems, that include deliberate sabotage from rival process server Tony (played by Vincent Pastore), Joe manages to deliver papers to Sara. She is very surprised to find that her husband intends to leave her, but immediately contemplates revenge and asks Joe to help her. If Joe forgets that he ever served her and instead serve her own divorce petition to Gordon in Texas, she might get much larger amount of money, part of it willing to share with Joe. He is at first reluctant but later goes to Texas in order to find Gordon.

Things didn’t look for Serving Sara from the start, and a lot of it can be attributed to terrible miscasting. Matthew Perry has earned his fame by appearing in Friends and all his efforts to translate his fame to big screen, with exception of The Whole Nine Yards, turned out to be a failures. But even those failures had talents around him, at least digestible script and director that appeared to know what he was doing. None of those can be found in Serving Sara, and, to make things even worse, Perry had to fight wildly publicised battle with drug addiction which postponed the production. As a result, Perry failed to get any sympathy among the audience for his character and almost all of his gags aren’t funny. Even Elizabeth Hurley, an experienced actress, completely failed to make her character likeable to the audience. Fans of Bruce Campbell, actor known for elevating films to cult status, are going to be particularly disappointed with his lifeless performance in Serving Sara.

But even more disappointing are screenwriters Jay Sherick and David Ronn who, apparently aware that many of their seemingly “clever” jokes simply won’t work, tried to compensate that with toilet humour more in line with the works of Farelly Brothers. That includes scene that features sexual activity that would challenge almost all of the viewers’ tastes in a manner of Freddy Got Fingered. The scene might not be as graphic as in Tom Green’s film, but it is graphic enough to again reveal hypocrisy of the MPAA Ratings Board censors which allowed this film to get PG-13 rating. With such catastrophic levels of badness, silence in theatres can be explained by viewers simply not believing how so many seemingly talented stars could be involved in something as atrocious as Serving Sara.

RATING: 1/10 (--)

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