- Movie Rating -

Heartbreakers (1985)

| March 22, 1985

I really wanted to me more invested in Heartbreakers.  This is potentially interesting portrait of two womanizing jerks who compete with one another and slowly begin to realize that true manhood is creeping up on them.  The problem is that the movie is not nearly as deep nor as full of human interest as it really needs to be.

Set in the pop-colour world of Los Angeles, the movie stars Peter Coyote and Nick Mancuso as Blue and Eli, who troll bars and bed anonymous women despite the fact that they are clearly about ten years too old to be doing this sort of thing.  Eli runs his father’s sportswear factor and Blue is an avant-garde artist and while they are still tomcatting around, they realize that this sort of empty party life has an expiration date.

Eli’s ambition is to get out of the scene of anonymous hook-ups and get into a real relationship; meanwhile Blue wants to become a successful artist without selling out to commercialism.  His problems only get worse when he realizes that Cyd (Kathryn Harrold) one of his favorite conquests has dropped him in favor of an abstract artist (Max Gail).  He manages to leave his dead-end job and get a showing at a reasonably prestigious gallery featuring a sexy model named Candy (played very well by Carol Wayne from ‘The Tonight Show’) that both Blue and Eli end up taking to bed.  But their real rivalry starts with the gallery’s assistant director, a French woman named Liliane (Carol Laure).

To be honest, I’m as uninterested writing all this as I was watching it.  The two guys are boorish and rather nauseating.  The women in their lives are empty save for Cyd who has such a heartbreaking backstory that I wanted the movie to follow her.  The whole movie is just an uninteresting slog.  It’s about man who need to grow up and a script that is more interested in their surface details than in their personal stories.

About the Author:

Jerry Roberts is a film critic and operator of two websites, Armchair Cinema and Armchair Oscars.
(1985) View IMDB Filed in: Drama
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