Today’s quick review: The Sweetest Thing. Christina (Cameron Diaz), a party girl with a fear of commitment, begins to have unfamiliar feelings when she meets Peter (Thomas Jane) at a club. Urged on by her best friends Courtney (Christina Applegate) and Jane (Selma Blair), Christina takes a wild road trip to visit Peter at his brother Roger’s (Jason Bateman) wedding and tell him how she feels.
The Sweetest Thing is a raunchy romantic comedy starring Cameron Diaz. Packed with sex jokes and poor decision-making, The Sweetest Thing follows three party-loving friends as they navigate the pitfalls of casual dating. In spite of a talented cast and a low-stakes premise, the movie wastes its potential. Tasteless humor, weak character work, and an almost nonexistent plot make it a hard sell even for viewers who are interested.
The Sweetest Thing gambles on crude humor in a major way. Nearly every joke in the movie revolves around sex, and the handful that don’t are just as lowbrow. Even setting aside the content of the humor, the jokes have a low hit rate. The setups are contrived, the payoffs are uninspired, and many of the jokes only exist as filler. While The Sweetest Thing has a few funny ideas here and there, it never really hits its stride as a comedy.
The movie also misses with its characters. Christina, Courtney, and Jane are meant to come across as funny and spontaneous, but they cross the line into crass and inconsiderate. Normally, this would be fine for a raunchy comedy, but the characters are not likable enough to get away with it. The movie spends so little time treating them like people that there is no reason to side with them when the situation inevitably gets awkward.
The one redeeming quality of The Sweetest Thing is its cast. Cameron Diaz, Christina Applegate, and Selma Blair are fun, vivacious, and well-suited to their roles. If the script showed even a little more restraint, the trio could be the backbone of an excellent comedy. Instead, they are given jokes that are at best hit-or-miss and a story that barely bothers to go through the motions of romance.
The Sweetest Thing will have a niche for the right viewer. Its solid cast and explicit, over-the-top humor at least give it a distinct identity, and some audiences will appreciate what it has to offer. But the extremes it goes to will turn off most ordinary viewers, and the story and characters are not enough to make the jokes worthwhile. Approach with caution if you’re a fan of raunchy comedies, and steer clear otherwise.
For a better use of Cameron Diaz, try What Happens in Vegas or Knight and Day. For a raunchy comedy with a little more heart, try That’s My Boy. For one with similar problems, try Game Over, Man!. For a more romantic movie about a woman chasing after a man she barely knows, try Sleepless in Seattle.
[5.2 out of 10 on IMDB](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0253867/). I give it a 4.5 for dodgy humor and a negligible plot.