After enduring both Bride Wars and He’s Just Not That Into You I went into Confessions of a Shopaholic expecting it to be the best of the bunch, although I didn’t think it would blow the doors off. Sure, it is still pushing female stereotypes with an emphasis on shopping, but the always enjoyable Isla Fisher is not only pleasing to the eye, but fun to watch at the same time so how bad could it really be. Unfortunately the answer to that question is bad, and I mean really bad. Bride Wars began with a premise that was doomed from the outset and He’s Just Not That Into You unabashedly hates women and did nothing to hide it. But Confessions of a Shopaholic has such a softball storyline it is astonishing how the film actively tries to get worse and worse as it plays on.
The film centers on Rebecca Bloomwood (Isla Fisher), a journalist for a home gardening magazine who gets laid off and finds herself confronted with an overwhelming $16 thousand credit card debt and no job. This would pose a problem for most people, but not Rebecca, she simply spends some more money, lands a job at a financial magazine of all places, writes one column, gains worldwide celebrity based on that one column, is featured on a famous morning TV show based on that one column and falls in love with her sexy Brit boss. Man, it’s awesome being in debt, everyone should do it!
This film spits in the face of the audience and takes you all for blundering fools. Within ten minutes of the film you already dislike Rebecca as an annoying obsessed shopper that just won’t quit. She whines and cries to her dimwitted friend who is only in the film to be a sounding board and add additional plot devices once it comes time to wrap this freak show up. The timeline is awful as we honestly see Rebecca gain international celebrity status off only one article and carry out multiple tasks in a matter of hours as if she was Jack Bauer on ecstasy.
Director P.J. Hogan (My Best Friend’s Wedding) cares so little for his actors he hired Jo Willems as his cinematographer who lights the stage as if we were meant to be watching Death itself on screen. John Goodman, Joan Cusack and Kristen Scott Thomas all look as if they just walked out of the morgue as a result of Willems’s lighting. It’s as if no one cared about the movie and I am rather certain no one did. Producer Jerry Bruckheimer even leaked early word that hidden inside the film was the poster debut for the upcoming Jake Gyllenhaal sword-and-sandal epic Prince of Persia. Talk about desperation as he tries to salvage a sinking ship.
Isla Fisher is her bubbly self and I can hardly complain as she earns her paycheck walking into glass walls and brazenly sharpening her pencil with an electric sharpener in the middle of her first staff meeting. But it is impossible for me to believe she read the first draft of this script and thought this film was a winner. Most insulting is the way it tries to weave in the country’s current economic downturn in a scene where Goodman, who plays Fisher’s father, says something to the effect of, “If the economy is billions of dollars in debt and can survive I’m sure you can too.” Has he turned on CNN lately?
There are so many ways this film could have been good, had they turned it into something of an old school screwball comedy or even tried to build on the angle that Rebecca had no idea what she was doing and some day became a qualified finance journalist — you know, cliché. But instead they play to the bubble gum crowd as they spent more money on the Rihanna music for the trailer as opposed to the obnoxious abundance of anonymous pop tunes sung by no names throughout this film including a god-awful slow-turn remake of Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” as the capper.
Confessions of a Shopaholic is the perfect storm of awful and while many will say its failure is partially due to the subject matter tied into the country’s current economic situation, the fact of the matter is a movie this bad shouldn’t (and hopefully won’t) be watched even during the best of times. The film gets a “D-” because I had maybe one or two chuckles and I felt like being kind, but don’t take that slight bump to mean anything more.
