Cameron Diaz plays the cool, brittle yin to Leslie Mann’s weepy, whiny yang in “The Other Woman,” an ungainly, often flat-footed yet weirdly compelling romantic dramedy about two gals who become unlikely best friends when they realize they’re being screwed (literally) by the same man. Like a watered-down “Diabolique” or a younger-skewing “First Wives Club,” this latest mainstream rebound from director Nick Cassavetes (after his dead-on-arrival 2012 indie “Yellow”) taps into the pleasures of sisterly solidarity and righteous revenge: Beneath the wobbly pratfalls and the scatological setpieces, there’s no denying the film’s mean-spirited kick, or its more-than-passing interest in what makes its women tick. These qualities should stand the slickly packaged Fox release in good stead with always-underserved female viewers as another superhero-filled summer gets under way.
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High-powered New York attorney Carly Whitten (Diaz) doesn’t suffer fools gladly or take dating too seriously, so it’s clearly a big deal when she makes it to eight weeks with a handsome businessman who goes by the none-too-subtle name of Mark King (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau). But Carly’s suspicion that the relationship might be too good to be true turns out to be well founded: Dropping by to surprise him one night at his home in Connecticut, she instead has an awkward first encounter with Kate (Mann), who she’s shocked to learn is Mark’s wife.
Furious and disgusted, but also calm and practical, Carly immediately resolves to dump Mark and move on. But Kate isn’t quite so ready to sever ties with her husband’s unwitting mistress: Over the next few days, she turns up at Carly’s law firm — and later, her apartment — in various states of inebriated distress, longing for details about Mark and Carly’s sexual habits, as well as advice on how to proceed.
While Carly initially recoils from Kate’s extreme neediness and insecurity, it’s not long before the desperate housewife and the put-together career woman realize they have more in common than they thought, bonding over their loneliness, their mutual loathing for the man who brought them together and, inevitably, their desire for payback.
Things get kicked up a notch when Kate and Carly, tailing Mark on one of his many weekend “business trips” (to the tune of Lalo Schifrin’s “Mission: Impossible” theme), find out that the cad has yet another mistress on layaway: Amber (Kate Upton), a young blonde bombshell who’s introduced running on the beach in slo-mo oglevision.
In a development that works better onscreen than it sounds on paper, Amber turns out to be sweet and wholly sympathetic, if mildly ditzy, and she happily joins Kate and Carly’s vengeful sisterhood. Observing all this from the sidelines, meanwhile, is Kate’s sensitive, good-looking brother Phil (Taylor Kinney), who serves as not only a convenient new love interest for Carly, but also the movie’s token acknowledgment that not all men are lying, cheating scumbuckets.