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'The Other Woman' Is the Movie Where Jamie Lannister Sh*ts His Suit Pants

By Dustin Rowles | Film | April 25, 2014 |

By Dustin Rowles | Film | April 25, 2014 |


One day, in the not too distant future, The Other Woman — starring Leslie Mann, Cameron Diaz, and Kate Upton — is going to make for one hell of a great YouTube clip. It’s a thoroughly rotten film that plays out exactly like you’d expect it to, plus half an hour of excruciating fill-time, but there is one triumphantly glorious, sublimely hilarious scene, and as soon as someone loads it up onto YouTube, it’s going to become part of every Game of Thrones meme for the next four years.

Jamie Lannister sh*ts his pants. The gag itself is generic, one that’s been used in 464 movies and television shows already. One of the women who Mark King has scorned — in this case, Cameron Diaz’s character, Carly — sprinkles some laxative into his drink while they’re at a restaurant, and the results are predictable, except for one thing: This is Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, f*cking Jamie Lannister, and he’s decked out in a sharp suit and looking dapper as f*ck, so when he starts sweating, farting, and blowing mudd while flailing around in a bathroom stall, he’s like a Chris Farley character trapped in the body of Patrick Bateman. It’s hilarious. If there’s one nice thing to come out of The Other Woman, it’s the knowledge that Nikolaj Coster-Waldau is an unexpectedly excellent physical comedian, a talent he wonderfully puts on display again in the film’s climactic finale.

Nikolaj Coster-Waldau is funny. The movie is not. It’s a tedious trip through a storyline I feel like we’ve walked through half a dozen times before: The wife (Leslie Mann), the mistress (Cameron Diaz), and the hot, younger girlfriend (Kate Upton) team up and bond over the fact that they’re all being lied to by Mark King, who is cheating on all of them. The bonding portion of the film unfortunately takes up the first two miserable acts, as Diaz and Mann’s character — and later, Upton’s — painfully yammer circles around their predicament over glasses of wine. It’s not until an hour and a half into the two-hour film that it suddenly occurs to them to get revenge, and that’s when The Other Woman rises slightly above braindead and transforms into an unpleasant Chuck Lorre sitcom.

Mann delivers a scene or two of decent physical comedy, Diaz plays the straight woman with little enthusiasm, and Upton — she’s very pretty, and seems awfully nice, and I hope she invests her modeling money well. Only Nikolaj Coster-Waldau as the philandering douchebag acquits himself respectfully, and that’s only because he allows himself to put aside his dignity and writhe around sweatily on a toilet seat shooting flaming liquid poo from his ass. It’s juvenile, and dumb, but that juxtaposition with what we expect from the typically dashing and stylish Nikolaj Coster-Waldau is exactly what makes it work.

Unfortunately, everything else about The Other Woman resembles the wreck that left in the toilet when he’s finished with it.