During their honeymoon on a Caribbean island, Reuben finds his wife Lisa cheating on him with a local diving instructor. Devastated and betrayed, he returns back to New York to his job as a risk analyst for life insurance, trying to find reasons to insure a very risky client, Leland. He then meets Polly, a former high school classmate, and asks her out. Despite her too wild lifestyle, they start a relationship. Unexpectedly, Lisa returns and wants to reconcile. Upon finding out that Reuben is weighing the percentage of his chances between her and Lisa on a computer, Polly dumps Reuben. He still manages to convince her to return to him.
Even though "Along Came Polly" came on the wave of success of his hit comedy "There's Something About Mary", it caught Ben Stiller in a good, but stilted comic performance that drew too many comparisons to the latter film, causing a backlash that the comedian got stuck in the same old role that became boring. While this consensus is wrong, the movie really seems predictable and derivative at times. It is semi-successful: some jokes work, some misfire. At least two sequences (Reuben accidentally rubbing his face of a sweaty man's chest while playing basketball; the clogged and flooded toilet) are really cheap attempts at humor, with several 'rough' edges disrupting the mood, but luckily there are enough good gags, as well, which make the movie fun and easy to watch. Philip Seymour Hoffman, though, steals the show as the character Sandy, a former child star who made only one film (!) but still pretends to be a famous movie star even as a grown up, who is a small comic gem. This culminates in two of the best moments in the entire film: one is when he hijacks the entire theater group by unilaterally re-casting himself from a supporting role of Judas to the main role of Jesus in a play, causing an epic backlash from Reuben's dad, and the other is when the plays Reuben at an important insurance conference ("All right, we all need to look into our hearts and go, "Do I think this dude is gonna die in a few years or not?" Is old Leland here gonna fight off a man... who goes by the last name "Reaper," first name "Grim"? Or will this BASE-jumping, crocodile-wrestling, shark-diving, volcano-lugging, bear-fighting, snake-wrangling, motocross-racing bastard die?"). The second most amusing performance was unexpectedly delivered by none other than Alec Baldwin, who gave a few delicious jokes as Reuben's office colleague.
Grade:++
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