Written by: Jay Scherick & David Ronn
Starring: Matthew Perry, Elizabeth Hurley, Bruce Campbell, Amy Adams, Vincent Pastore
Rating: [0.5/5]
Every genre of film has its stinkers. Those movies bringing shame to everyone else who gets up every day trying to make something special in this art form. For whatever reason, no other genre has quite the level of horrific additions than romantic comedies. Films failing at every aspect of being romantic or comedic and it becomes grating to watch, which perfectly sums up Serving Sara. Something not worth indulging in even if brought in by the promise of the two stars at the helm.
Struggling at his position as a process server, Joe (Matthew Perry) gets assigned the job to serve divorce papers to Sara (Elizabeth Hurley). When he does serve her the papers, he gets offered the opportunity to help her for a sum of $1 million.
All that can be said about Serving Sara is the word unfortunate. A film with a somewhat intriguing premise and a decent cast, but an execution so deeply devoid of any quality it leaves absolutely nothing to take away as a positive. It becomes one of those cases where you give it credit simply for existing and seeing the light of day, especially because of the issues centering on Matthew Perry during the filming process and how it might have hampered the production. However, Perry’s issues in no way absolve what this script attempts to present as an engaging story or bits of comedy when it decides to utilize terribly juvenile humor to the degree where it stunned me on multiple occasions any of it survived an edit going through it. You get to the point where Joe needs to stick his arm up a bull’s anus and you just know you’ve reached the pinnacle of comedy, let me tell you.
Thus we get a glut of terrible jokes layered upon each other as we try to get through what resembles a plot and try to force together a romance containing the opposite of what anyone would consider chemistry leaving nothing to enjoy about the feature. The emptiness of the comedy and the story as a whole will do nothing but generate anger about the talented people brought together so uninspired and not worth the time. Its silliness can’t even receive over of having an endearing quality simply because of how this feature runs away from any opportunity to try to demonstrate some insight on anything other than divorce law and how these papers get served. At the very least you can see the struggles of working as a process server.
Deception and trickery serve as the name of the game for people in this line of work as no one wishes to receive a notice of a lawsuit coming their way. It brings the saying “don’t shoot the messenger” to its extreme where this messenger comes with the threat of some serious financial and legal damage. As you can imagine the recipient of these notices does not like the individual person, even as a third party, delivering this news to them. This film, of course, only uses the idea of this job as some competition when it comes to Joe and his colleague Tony (Vincent Pastore). A tired plotline the second they introduce it and it, of course, drags on for the entirety of the plot.
For such a disaster of a movie, the cast brought together does raise some eyebrows. You had Matthew Perry during his peak as Friends dominated the airwaves, Elizabeth Hurley during her prime as an actor, and then a bevy of smaller roles like Bruce Campbell, Cedric the Entertainer, Terry Crews, Jerry Stiller, and even a cameo from Amy Adams. In all honesty, the only reason I decided to watch this feature came from my desire to see all of Adams’s films and it paid me dirt with the few generous minutes she receives in this feature. A real waste for them all including myself.
It comes as no surprise no one speaks of Serving Sara other than in the context of Matthew Perry’s substance abuse journey as it stands as its only definable impact. The narrative fails to deliver a story worth watching and relies on some of the most basic and unfunny humor one could think of. This all culminates in what is meant to operate as a romantic comedy, which does not help the already uphill battle this genre has in legitimacy as this feature along with others just weighs it down. Throw it in the bin.
Films with Josh 
