Serving Sara Movie Review

With his painfully dreary performance in Serving Sara, Matthew Perry proves he will never play any character in a movie other than his annoying Chandler Bing from the television series Friends. If I really wanted to watch Perry be Bing, I could find the same comedy routine in this film on daily reruns of the show. And that would be free. And much less of a waste of time.

In Serving Sara, Perry plays a process server named Joe who has a tendency to screw-up the serving of court papers to his clients. But for some reason beyond comprehension, his boss Ray (Cedric the Entertainer) decides to give the next big assignment to Joe. All he needs to do is rush across town to serve divorce papers to Sara Moore (Elizabeth Hurley). Difficult? Of course! When Joe meets the beautiful Sara, she bribes him with a hefty reward to instead serve the divorce papers on her husband Gordon (Bruce Campbell).

Joe and Sara’s search for Gordon takes them into the heart of Texas where they learn Gordon is planning to sell Sara’s cattle ranch to a group of Asian investors once the divorce is finalized. Since Joe has failed to serve papers to Sara, Ray has assigned another process server named Tony (Vincent Pastore) to track the pair down and make sure Sara receives her papers. What follows is a tedious cat and mouse chase through farm country to find out which set of papers is served first.

Besides being the Chandler Bing show on a cattle ranch, Serving Sara fails to serve up anything remotely fresh or funny. There are only two scenes worth noting that got even the slightest chuckle from me. One requires Joe to stick his arm into a bull’s anus to help stimulate the production of, er, fluids. The other takes place at a monster truck show where the audience scatters from their seats, guns in hand, when it is announced an Ebola virus carrier (Gordon) is in the arena. Mostly, the comedic timing is incredibly out of synch and there is no shred of chemistry between Perry and Hurley.

Come to think of it, I think Perry had more chemistry with that bull. Don’t waste your time with Serving Sara. And if you’re really a big fan of Matthew Perry, a rerun of your favorite Friends episode will satisfy your thirst much better – though I can’t understand why.

The Serving Sara DVD has one feature that goes unparalleled in history (to my knowledge): Every bit of film is commented by director Reginald Hudlin: the outtakes, the deleted scenes, the extended scenes, and the movie itself. Even more amazingly, Hudlin is unable to make any of this material watchable in the slightest.

Hey, sexy.