Joe Tyler, played by Matthew Perry, is your average schmuck. His job has "no future, no benefits," so he takes out his frustration by displeasing the individuals that surround him. This actually works itself out nicely because in Serving Sara, he's a process server; he makes a living handing subpoenas to evasive clients.
Take Fat Charlie, a prototypical New Yawk mob boss. At the beginning of the film, Joe shimmies down an elevator shaft and plays a lousy hand of Blackjack in the racketeer's underground club before he smoothly hands him the court papers.
But this is Matthew Perry. Not treading too far from his role of Chandler on "Friends," he's still that guy full of imperfections who walks his way into unpleasant situations. In his last movies, it meant getting a Mexican hottie pregnant in Vegas (Fools Rush In) and living next door to a hitman (The Whole Nine Yards). In Serving Sara, he can't even cross the street without having a near-fatal accident.
Of course, a guy who has a client that looks like Sara Moore (original Austin Powers babe Elizabeth Hurley) can't complain. Sara's Texas-based millionaire husband Gordon (Bruce Campbell of Evil Dead) has a proclivity to a young goldigger and decides to file for divorce.
Joe, the middleman who delivers Sara the papers in her Manhattan apartment, informs her that her husband is exploiting Texas' conservative divorce laws that allow him full legal rights to his estate and their bank account. Playing on Joe's job dissatisfaction, Sara convinces him to ignore the subpoena and serve divorce papers to Gordon. That way, under New York state law, she receives 50 percent of all her husband's assets. And Joe gets a cool million from the deal.
Director Reginald Hudlin allows the rest of the movie to jump from one humorously disastrous obstacle to the next as the two try to serve the papers to a well-protected Gordon in the Texas heartland. Predictably, most of the disasters either befall Joe or his bumbling competitor, Tony (Vincent Pastore). A string of cheap but effective laughs are weaved together in scenes where Joe gets the living crap beat out of him by Fat Charlie's burly goons and has the pleasure of anally forcing a bull to ejaculate. Anyone who felt ill in City Slickers when Billy Crystal helped a cow give birth might want to take a bathroom break during this scene.
And unlike some recent comedies that have hit the theater lately, Serving Sara isn't simply a vehicle for one star. Hurley, Campbell, Pastore and Joe's boss Ray (Cedric the Entertainer) all are given time to shine. Hurley compliments Perry by bringing a little class to the screen.
Serving Sara isn't the god-awful, abysmal representation of the dog days of August that almost every critic claims it is. Enjoying it is just a matter of lowering your standards. Any person compelled by the trailers to see the film probably isn't anticipating something deep.
The bread and butter of Serving Sara's humor is to play off of stereotypes, such as gruff, New York-based Italian mobsters, or loud, proud, gun-toting Texans. It's funny the way a welcoming billboard at the airport advertises, "Texas: Home of 'Ol Sparky," with a picture of an electric chair.
One bit of this stereotype-based humor is this dialogue between Joe and Sara: she tells him, "I don't get you Americans and your two-minute showers," after he mocks his high-maintenance, English-born client for taking too long in the bathroom. He cynically replies, "Well, it could be worse. We could be French and skip the whole thing." It's not original, but it serves its purpose in a movie that plays Kid Rock's "Cowboy" when the characters fly into Texas.
An unexpected highlight is Cedric the Entertainer. Donning a flashy red suit, Cedric is a well-dressed presence that manages to pull off a few decent jokes. He doesn't have the full comedic range that he had in The Original Kings of Comedy, but lines like "I'll chase her down like she owes me money," or "A redneck telling a black man he's going to hang him?Ae_ it's the new millennium," add a bit of spice to the movie's rather conventional sense of humor.
