"Head Over Heels" is four different movies thrown haphazardly into one script. Part romantic comedy, part over-the-top satire of the fashion industry, part lowest common denominator toilet humour, and part "Hitchcock-style thriller" (of all things), the movie is a bizarre and sloppy mishmash of styles and genres that could almost be considered original if it weren't so incredibly poorly executed.
Set in New York, the ludicrous plot features Monika Potter as Amanda Pierce, a restorer of Renaissance paintings at the Met with tremendously bad luck with men who, after finding her live-in boyfriend cheating on her, moves into a tiny room in a glamorous apartment populated by four wacky supermodels. She starts to fall for her neighbour Jim (Freddie Prinze Jr.), a fashion executive whose apartment theirs conveniently overlooks, so Amanda and the models start spying on Jim to see if he really is as perfect as he appears. All goes well until one night Amanda thinks she see Jim killing a young woman with a baseball bat, and when the police won't take her seriously, she and the models launch an investigation of their own.
Are you following so far? I feel inane just recounting the plot - imagine having to actually sit through it.
Throw in some gratuitous running gags about horny dogs, diarrhoea, and prat-falling models, and graft on a subplot about undercover FBI agents tracking diamond smuggling in the Russian mafia and you pretty much get the gist of this strange, bad movie. Freddie Prinze Jr. is as wooden as ever, and not anywhere near convincing enough to pull off a character with some intrigue and mystery surrounding him. Monika Potter is just sort of bland and forgettable as Amanda, despite desperate attempts to be cute and endearing. The roommates, played by supermodels Tomiko Fraser, Shalom Harlow, Ivana Milicevic, and Sarah O'Hare, should rightfully take more than a little flack for choosing to portray their own community in such a shallow, greedy, and stupid light. It's virtually impossible to scrape together one redeeming quality between the lot of them.
Director Mark S. Waters, whose choice to follow up his promising debut "The House of Yes" with this dreck is a monument to Hollywood's mediocritising new talent, doesn't to much to help this film, but the real fault must be placed on the writing team (it's invariably the really terrible scripts that have the most writers attached - true to tradition, this one has four people involved in creating the story, two of which also wrote the screenplay), who are no doubt responsible for the unfocused, unfunny collection of scenes that make up "Head Over Heels."
Set in New York, the ludicrous plot features Monika Potter as Amanda Pierce, a restorer of Renaissance paintings at the Met with tremendously bad luck with men who, after finding her live-in boyfriend cheating on her, moves into a tiny room in a glamorous apartment populated by four wacky supermodels. She starts to fall for her neighbour Jim (Freddie Prinze Jr.), a fashion executive whose apartment theirs conveniently overlooks, so Amanda and the models start spying on Jim to see if he really is as perfect as he appears. All goes well until one night Amanda thinks she see Jim killing a young woman with a baseball bat, and when the police won't take her seriously, she and the models launch an investigation of their own.
Are you following so far? I feel inane just recounting the plot - imagine having to actually sit through it.
Throw in some gratuitous running gags about horny dogs, diarrhoea, and prat-falling models, and graft on a subplot about undercover FBI agents tracking diamond smuggling in the Russian mafia and you pretty much get the gist of this strange, bad movie. Freddie Prinze Jr. is as wooden as ever, and not anywhere near convincing enough to pull off a character with some intrigue and mystery surrounding him. Monika Potter is just sort of bland and forgettable as Amanda, despite desperate attempts to be cute and endearing. The roommates, played by supermodels Tomiko Fraser, Shalom Harlow, Ivana Milicevic, and Sarah O'Hare, should rightfully take more than a little flack for choosing to portray their own community in such a shallow, greedy, and stupid light. It's virtually impossible to scrape together one redeeming quality between the lot of them.
Director Mark S. Waters, whose choice to follow up his promising debut "The House of Yes" with this dreck is a monument to Hollywood's mediocritising new talent, doesn't to much to help this film, but the real fault must be placed on the writing team (it's invariably the really terrible scripts that have the most writers attached - true to tradition, this one has four people involved in creating the story, two of which also wrote the screenplay), who are no doubt responsible for the unfocused, unfunny collection of scenes that make up "Head Over Heels."