Promising 'Breakin' All the Rules' dashes hopes

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Friday, May 14, 2004

Promising 'Breakin' All the Rules' dashes hopes

By SEAN AXMAKER
SPECIAL TO THE POST-INTELLIGENCER

"Falling in love is blissful insanity, but breaking up is a rational act."

MOVIE REVIEW

BREAKIN' ALL THE RULES

DIRECTOR: Daniel Taplitz

CAST: Jamie Foxx, Morris Chestnut, Gabrielle Union, Jennifer Esposito, Peter MacNicol

RUNNING TIME: 85 minutes

RATING: PG-13 for sexual material/humor and language

WHERE: Cinema 17, Crossroads 8, Factoria, Grand Cinemas, Longston Place 14, Marysville Cinema 14, Meridian 16, Parkway Plaza 12, Redmond Town Center, Renton Village, Woodinville 12

GRADE: C+

Little is strictly rational but even less has the charge of blissful insanity in Daniel Taplitz's fitfully clever but often insightful romantic farce. Everything here is strategic, from hooking up to splitting up.

Jamie Foxx, usually all bluster and misbehavior, downshifts his hyperactive persona to play the quietly charming Quincy, a straight shooter magazine writer who plays everything safe. That includes his love life, which collapses when he's painfully dumped on the night of his engagement party. His pain leads to inspiration and he emerges from depression with a best-selling guide on how to leave a lover.

If romance is war, then Quincy's handbook is all about the strategy of retreat with the fewest losses, and soon everybody is from his playbook.

Cousin Evan (Morris Chestnut), a smooth lady's man who has yet to carry a romance beyond his self-imposed three-month sell-by date, road-tests the theories. His boss (fidgety Peter MacNicol) takes private lessons in order to leave a cunning golddigger (Jennifer Esposito) before she maneuvers him into marriage. And there's Nikki (Gabrielle Union), whom Evan dumps and spends the rest of the film pursuing.

To complicate the farce, Quincy starts dating Nikki (thinking she's someone else) and Evan (passing himself off as Quincy) starts an affair with the golddigger.

Writer/director Taplitz can't manage the madcap grace of the mistaken identity comedies that inspired his farce, but he delivers something unexpected. Amid the cynical manipulations of casual romancers, jilted lovers and scheming players are some perceptive observations on the complications and contradictions of love, romance and relationships. And, between drunk-dog jokes and urination gags, the dialogue has an unexpectedly smart sense of articulation, which Foxx delivers with easy confidence.

"Breakin' All the Rules" is full of sharp ideas and wry moments awaiting the inspired ingenuity of a screwball comedy to pull it all together. It never comes. True love draws blood, or so the film's awkward metaphor goes. "Breakin' All the Rules" leaves little more than a hickey.

Sean Axmaker is a movie reviewer and free-lance film writer based in Seattle. He can be reached via e-mail at seanax@hotmail.com.