Jack and Jill Review

The premise is a costume, and the film never finds a second move. Jill is loud, needy and physically broad, Jack is embarrassed by her, and for ninety minutes the camera waits for one of those two facts to produce a laugh. The gags are built almost entirely out of her body and her voice, which means the film spends its running time being unkind to a character it wants the audience to love by the last reel. The turn to sentiment arrives with no scene to support it, because nothing before it has treated Jill as a person with an interior.

Around this sits an actual advertisement. Jack's job is to sign Al Pacino for a Dunkin' Donuts campaign, the product is named constantly, and the film closes by playing the finished commercial, which makes the plot a delivery system. That is difficult to assess as comedy, because the structure is not built to reach a joke.

Some things do work. Dean Cundey, who shot Back to the Future and Jurassic Park, photographs it like a real studio picture, and the cruise ship and Los Angeles material is clean and readable. Katie Holmes plays the wife with more patience than the writing deserves. Pacino, working an exaggerated version of himself, is the only performer given permission to be strange, and his commitment is the closest the film comes to a joke that is about something.

It swept every Razzie category in 2012, the first film ever to do so, and still opened in second place at the box office behind Immortals.