The film was a big surprise for me as I had gone into this thinking it would be yet some more commercial pap, more sentimental than cynical and with gags that would not challenge the mentality of my 10-year-old terrier. Yet "Heartbreakers" was involving throughout its two-hour running time and did not at all depend on the expertise of Gene Hackman to bring it to life a half-hour into the game.

Fans of "Hannibal" will get a kick out of seeing Ray Liotta with his head screwed back on. Liotta performs in the role of a stolen-car serviceman, Dean Cumanno, who falls madly in love with the sexy Angela only to be left high and literally dry on his icy wedding night. The following morning, his attention is riveted on his pretty receptionist, Wendy, and while she is engaging him under the desk the two are caught in the act by the "heartbroken" Angela. Looking to make one last score before they hang up their uplift bras, the two hone in on aging billionaire tobacco executive, William B. Tensy (Gene Hackman), figuring that even if he doesn't buy the daughter's mock seduction after marrying Angela, he might do them a favor by dropping dead, thereby leaving them the major part of three billion dollars. Perpetually puffing on his product, the liver-spotted Tensy not only kills a parrot instantly with second-hand smoke but brags about his experiments addicting nine-year-olds with the weed. This movie does more to deride the tobacco industry than Michael Mann's "The Insider" could.

In the film's only sentimental motif, Wendy risks falling in love with Jack Withrowe (Jason Lee), owner of prime property in California's Palm Beach--the very hazard that her mother had warned her against.

The fifty-one-year-old Sigourney Weaver never looked better, figuratively running rings around her adorable but too outwardly meanspirited daughter played by Hewitt. The mother-daughter combination works well, giving the audience the impression of a love-hate relationship between a girl of scarcely twenty years old wanting independence and her own life while at the same caring deeply about her and respecting the moneymaking schemes on which they thrive. Jason Lee does fine as a somewhat goofy and naive owner of a bar, unwilling to see that he is being taken for a ride despite ample evidence, and Saturday Night Live's Nora Dunn has a grand moment as Miss Madress, a billionaire's housekeeper not fond of letting any woman into the life of her aging employer.

Except for Lee's character, there's no one among these dirty rotten scoundrels that you'd want to take home (wait: I take that back), but who cares? This is a well-paced, genuinely amusing piece of work that subverts the tobacco industry as well as the more potentially deadly institution of marriage.