Whenever a movie with hot commercial prospects like The Heartbreak Kid takes a nosedive, critics are the ones who take the rap. 

DreamWorks spokesmen were quick to note that this atrocious remake of the 1972 Elaine May classic was an R-rated movie and that R-rated moves were dependent on reviews -- which in this case were harsher than the company expected after a puffy rave in the trade paper Variety. Earth to DreamWorks: not only is this movie lousy, it attempts the impossible task of  being meanspirited about one female lead and sentimental about the other -- and audiences pick up on a film that tries to have things every which way. In this piece of closet misogyny, the hero's sexually voracious wife is seen as a comic monster and his dream girl is comfortable acting like one of the guys: You might as well have had the male lead, Ben Stiller, sing "Why Can't a Woman Be More Like a Man?" The original Heartbreak Kid was a model of economy but this one, trying and failing to simplify everyone's psychology and make the hero more "likable," drags on and on -- when you make characters banal, it's hard to create scenes in which more than one thing happens at a time. The lame attempts at "turn-on" scenes just helped turn this Heartbreak Kid into a thumb-twiddler.

As the Rock ruled with The Game Plan, The Kingdom slipped to No. 3, a disappointment for Peter Berg's stirring idealistic fantasy about the FBI taking names and kicking butt in Saudi Arabia. (Why did every critic say this film was apolitical? Does the press have a memory span as short as the mass audience? Wasn't it controversial to say that the war on terrorism should be a police action?) But 3:10 to Yuma continued its triumphant ride, posting a small 28 percent decline and proving that even in a lowest-common-denominator marketplace, talent, sometimes, will win out.