Serving Sara (2002)
ZERO STARS/****
starring Matthew Perry, Elizabeth Hurley, Vincent Pastore, Bruce Campbell
screenplay by Jay Scherick & David Ronn
directed by Reginald Hudlin
by Walter Chaw Reginald Hudlin’s Serving Sara is a miserable, listless, pathetic excuse for a movie. It’s already dreadful by the time Matthew Perry finds himself shoulder-deep in a bull’s rectum, after which it defies a few natural laws by somehow getting worse. There are no laughs to be found in the whole of this lugubrious shipwreck–even the sight of Perry getting the tar beaten out of him by a pair of Italian caricatures is a sour, joyless affair. Seeing as being physically humiliated is Perry’s sole silver-screen reason for being (see also: The Whole Nine Yards), that his getting kicked and punched is not ever at all amusing says a great deal about the relentless excrescence of this exercise. I would add that at least it’s better than the amazingly awful Perry vehicle Almost Heroes, except that it’s not.