OxfordPress.com

Grade: C+

Verdict: Can't decide whether to be naughty or nice, but the stars are yummy.

Details: Starring Sigourney Weaver, Jennifer Love Hewitt and Jason Lee. Directed by David Mirkin. Rated PG-13 for sex-related content, including dialogue. Two hours, 4 minutes.

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Review: If you're a Sigourney Weaver fan, “Heartbreakers” may break your heart. It'll remind you of how few really good mainstream Hollywood scripts she gets these days — unless, that is, they have the word “alien” in the title.

Anyway, “Heartbreakers” isn't terrible; it's just not as good as it could've been. What begins as a nifty distaff twist on “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” (or a broadly comic variation on “The Grifters”), slides into a strained cross between “Weekend at Bernie's” and any given mother-daughter movie on Lifetime. Still, you stick with it because Weaver and her co-star Jennifer Love Hewitt are so appealing.

They play Max and Page Conners, a mother-daughter con-artist team. Their best scam involves a wedding/seduction combo in which some rich idiot gets taken for all he's worth. It's pretty simple when you look as good in tight skirts and push-up bras as these two do.

When they find out they owe the IRS a bundle, the pair head to Palm Beach, a traditional stronghold of wealthy old men looking for some, um, stimulation. The older the better, Max notes. “With luck, they die right after the wedding and then we're talking widow money.”

She hones in on a tobacco tycoon (Gene Hackman). But Page wants to be “the primary.” Meaning, she thinks she can bag a better bet than her mom can. Her choice: a soulfully cute bar owner (Jason Lee of “Almost Famous”), whose charmingly distressed place is sitting on $3 million worth of development property.

Inside this overdone though occasionally funny film is a razor-sharp one trying to get out. Weaver and Hewitt are quite good together — a shark and a piranha who can pull off everything from a free meal (put some crushed glass in your salad) to a free room (“slip” on the polished floor of some posh hotel) and still lapse into typical mother-daughter bickering.

Hackman, in what amounts to an extended cameo, has a ball as a chain-smoking, liver-spotted lech with stained teeth and a deadly wheeze. And Ray Liotta, who plays their first victim, is as off the wall as he was as brain food in “Hannibal.”

So why isn't “Heartbreakers” better? Perhaps it's a mismatch behind the camera. The director, David Mirkin, has won writing Emmys for “The Simpsons” and worked on “The Larry Sanders Show.” But his writers are responsible for “Mouse Hunt” (yes, it apparently had a script) and the dismal “Little Rascals” movie. Was “Heartbreakers” a smart, nasty flick that the studio felt should be more cuddly? Or was it a cuddly film that collided with a “Simpsons” sensibility?

Either way, it's a lost opportunity.

— Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, (none)