Yes, the old con game movie. Father-son, husband-wife, girlfriend-boyfriend, this time it’s mother-daughter. They sort of took some of the fun out of things when it’s very clear from the movie trailers that Sigourney Weaver and Jennifer Love-Hewitt are scamming Weaver’s new husband, played by Ray Liotta. It’s the opening sequence and I wondered if it might have been more entertaining if I did not know that beforehand. Anyway, enough of me trying to change the way the movie people try to entice you into buying tickets, but this is one of those movies where the trailers have already played most of the best jokes.

Heartbreakers is the story of Max and Page Conners, a mother-daughter con artist tag team. Most of their big scores involve Mom (Sigourney) marrying some mark and then daughter (Jennifer) seducing the guy so Mom can then divorce and make off with some money. Liotta plays Dean, the first guy we see the pair swindle, but Mom’s been married thirteen times so this has happened many times before. Which is exactly the problem for Page. She wants to go off and con some guys on her own but Mom keeps holding on because she can’t bare to see what happened to her happen to her baby as well. Isn’t that sweet? So what did happen to Mom? Ah, see for yourself. All I’ll say is this is a movie that expects you to laugh along and enjoy the scams pulled off by this anything but loveable pair and then feel for them as they try to find their way through this delicate mother-daughter issue. Please! Love-Hewitt is mostly annoying. She’s nasty, moody and a gold digger. Which is fine. She’s supposed to be. But to root for her when she seems to finally find “true love” with a guy played by Jason Lee is a stretch. Why would a great guy like this fall for this phony? She’s attractive all right, but obviously up to something and he never catches on. She can’t figure out whether to scam him or stay with him for the rest of her life. I don’t look for realism in comedy movies, but how about a little consistency? The character Lee plays is bright, quick-witted and seems like he’d never fall for this con.

However, Dean fits in well with the whole con game. He’s a shady chop shop guy from New Jersey and is stupid enough to fall for all this. It’s pretty funny watching Max pull off the con on him and I enjoyed seeing how Sigourney ropes these guys in but manages, even on their wedding night, to avoid sleeping with them. Dean comes back around later in the movie and is a welcome sight as he calls the women on what they’re up to. Also a welcome sight in this movie is a character named Bill Tensy, a tobacco multimillionaire who Max decides to hit up for one last big score with her daughter. Tensy is played by Gene Hackman, who couldn’t have a better name to play that role. He coughs his way through one scene after another and even though he should have seen through Max’s bad Russian accent and over-the-top seduction, who cares since he’s only a tobacco company executive.

Heartbreakers, most of the time, had the right mood going. The ladies are good, but plenty of times meet up with some foul-ups in their schemes and I found that pretty funny and handled quite well. They can’t be taken seriously and they should have stayed on that theme. Instead, they try to resolve the problem of the pair growing apart and because these are, after all, scam artists, why should I care if they end up happy? It all adds about a half hour of mostly unfunny and uninteresting time to this movie. I give Heartbreakers a “6.0” on the scale.