The Other Woman

Cameron Diaz is Carly, the kind of hard-hitting, go-getting lawyer who doesn’t have time to practice any actual law – she’s too busy sleeping with a variety of men whose names she doesn’t even bother remembering because they’re just that disposable. Then she meets Mark (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), and all that changes: now she’s not only remembering his name, she’s only sleeping with him. Now that she’s in love, she does what everyone does when they’re in love: she dresses up as a sexy plumber and goes over to his house to help him with “his pipes”. This is a bad move because who should open the door but Mark’s wife, Kate (Leslie Mann). Why a man cheating on his wife would give his mistress – who doesn’t know he’s married – his home address is a mystery that’s swept under the carpet as Kate, a): has a total breakdown over discovering her husband is cheating on her, then b): decides to latch on to the woman he’s cheating on her with as her new best friend. Which are the funniest scenes in the film right up until the moment her giant dog takes a dump on Carly’s floor. Next up: revenge! On Mark, not the dog.
Unfortunately this film isn’t really interested in the revenge side of things all that much, so while Carly and Kate comes up with a variety of schemes to ruin Mark’s life (slipping him female hormones! Putting hair remover in his shampoo!), each scheme plays out exactly as you would expect for one follow-up scene (he grows boobs and his nipples are sensitive! His hair kind of falls out!) and then is never mentioned again.
By this stage, Mark’s third lady friend, Amber (Kate Upton), has arrived and jogged up and down along a beach in a bikini, so the film doesn’t really care about her anymore and the rest of the film turns out to involve some kind of massive financial scam Mark is running, which wouldn’t even be a problem if he was smart enough to rip off poor people but he seems to have made the mistake of messing with rich dudes so he’s got to be taken down, and hard.
Does this sound like a fun time to you? If so, go for it; otherwise this occasionally funny but largely slap-dash mess is one to avoid.
Written by Anthony Morris