Review: The Other Woman (2014).

This movie is not about ‘The Other Woman’ but rather what women can do for each other when we need it the most.

It starts as most movies do: boy meets girl, girl likes boy. Boy is married and wife shows up at work wondering what the heck is going on. Several drinks in multiple sittings later, Carly (Cameron Diaz) and Kate’s (Leslie Mann) friendship is a thing of gold. Kate even says to Carly: “you wanted to be my friend, you just didn’t know it.” Retconning and bringing down Kate’s husband aside, that’s pretty much the long and short of it.

My favourite scene has got to be them finding the third woman in Mark’s (Nikolai Coster-Waldau) life. It’s one of those scenes that is particular to the struggles of being a modern woman: you can be replaced if there is a younger, pretty, sexier version of you out there. And the movie makers pull out all the clichéd stops and shots of Amber’s (Kate Upton) smoking hot body but juxtapose it with the ridiculousness of Kate trying to pull Carly into a body lock to stop her from taking Amber down, only to end up hanging off her like a monkey. The thing is, as ditsy as Amber is, she is part of the sisterhood and she never betrays that, which is why this is such a good movie about women for women. It is proven again when Kate falters and is pulled back into her husband’s orbit that she hurts the person she cares about most, and that isn’t Mark, but Carly.

Of course the end is a good one: Kate’s happy, Carly’s happy, Amber’s happy and Mark is decidedly not happy. I can live with that. Not everything has to be earth shattering to be good but it is nice to be reminded that in the worse of times it’s our friends who pick us up and brush us off and we should love them more for it.

 

Rating: 3.5 / 5 stars. Perfect for Girl’s Night but maybe not so much for Date Night.