There's something about vulgarity

In 1972's "The Heartbreak Kid," Charles Grodin played a New York Jew who dumps his wife on their Miami Beach honeymoon so he can pursue the blond Minnesota coed he meets at their resort. The movie, directed by Elaine May from Neil Simon's adaptation of a Bruce Jay Friedman short story, is unpolished, oddly broad, and not always believable. And yet it still has a quiet, scathing power about Jewish self-loathing. The Grodin character is a selfish boor who really does break his new wife's heart.

This much louder, more vulgar version of the movie from Bobby and Peter Farrelly has Ben Stiller in the Grodin role, and it starts off asking a much different question. Does a single 40-year-old man yearn for marriage the way some women do? Eddie lives in San Francisco, hangs out with his horndog father (Jerry Stiller) and his best friend (Rob Corddry), for whom marriage is a kind of indentured servitude. Eddie's loneliness is a source of comic humiliation. At the wedding of an ex, he gets seated at the singles table, and he's the only person over the age of 15.

Eventually Eddie meets a tall blonde named Lila (Malin Akerman) outside a laundromat (her purse has just been snatched), and they fall in love. Soon a glitch arrives: Her environmental-research job requires a move to Rotterdam. But her company doesn't force married couples to go. So after six weeks together, Eddie decides to marry her. The Farrellys, who share screenwriting credit with Leslie Dixon, Scot Armstrong, and Kevin Barnett, show Eddie really weighing the decision (his father and his buddy bean him with their opinions). So it makes sense when he agrees to become a husband - it's a rare chance at happiness. But not long after these two drive down to Cabo San Lucas, the movie stops being an exploration of a bachelor's soul and, for better and worse, starts becoming a Farrelly brothers movie.

Better because the brothers have an uncanny gift for locating the comedy in obscenity and making it lovable. Eddie and Lila don't consummate their marriage until the honeymoon, and their ribald maiden tryst is like a Skinemax farce: She's the very kinky girl Rick James got excited about. But the script mutates Lila from a sexual adventuress and cutely annoying free spirit who sings along with the Spice Girls on a road trip into a dim nutbag harboring one shocking revelation after another (she's bad at math, she doesn't understand the missionary position, and so on). Akerman does the best she can with a part that requires her to go from sweet to stark-raving mad. But the movie doesn't have the patience to be fair to Lila - her bikini with the jungle-cat print alone feels like a judgment. The character goes from Cameron Diaz in the Farrellys' magnum opus, "There Something About Mary," to a graduate of the Glenn Close Psycho Academy. The humanity leaks out of her like air from a deflating tire.

This is all to make more appealing the new woman Eddie meets at the beach bar - Michelle Monaghan, who seems a lot happier in a comedy than she does as action-movie damsel. Her name is Miranda, and Eddie falls instantly in love with her. And she and her family - excusing her suspicious cousin, Martin (Danny R. McBride) - fall back. They're in Mexico from Oxford, Miss., and she's as fun as Lila appeared to be, only she's not crazy. By this point, the movie has abandoned its source material and turned needlessly complicated. There's some business with the Mexican guy who works the bar - Carlos Mencia, laying his accent on thick - a mariachi band that doesn't know when to quit, and a stab at some border-crossing satire that's not as amusing or gangbusters as it needs to be. (The Mexicans here are all dirty, drunk, or deceitful.)

The Farrellys turned a corner with their previous movie, "Fever Pitch," which was a great romantic comedy about the compromises of loving someone. They even managed to get a priceless piece of comedic acting from Drew Barrymore, a star whom the directors really seemed to adore. That kind of affection is missing from "The Heartbreak Kid." Then again, so is the human cruelty of Elaine May's original, which has been amplified here for big, stupid laughs. Her movie was about a repugnant man. This remake is ultimately content to be repugnant.

Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com.