Heartbreaker

When families and friends think a woman can do better than her current mate, they hire Alex Lippi (Romain Duris) and his two-person team — his sister and her husband — to provide such a powerful seduction that all she sees is this new perfect man. He’ll dump her and disappear. But she’ll know what real romantic satisfaction is. He’s perfect only because his clients give information about the woman’s favorite stuff, what the mate lacks, what the woman desires. Each job is treated with the slickness (costumes, props, lite-funk score) used for most modern spy capers, namely “Mission: Impossible.’’

Pascal Chaumeil directed “Heartbreaker,’’ which is credited to three screenwriters. This is a movie whose cynicism in the name of idealism might have appealed to Billy Wilder. But it has neither a cynic’s conviction nor idealist’s perseverance, and its ideas about what a woman wants seem cribbed from bad paperback fiction. All the same, the movie was a smash in France and is destined for an American remake.

This being a comedy well south of original (cue the last-minute airport epiphany), Alex starts falling for his latest mission: Juliette, a woman on vacation in Monaco whose corrupt father has hired Alex’s team to sabotage her engagement to a well-heeled, morally flawless Englishman. It’s an illogical job, since the couple seems happy enough, but Alex takes it because he’s a spendaholic in debt. Otherwise, this assignment doesn’t seem terribly unique. All that differentiates it from previous ones is that it hasn’t been stuffed into one of the zippy seduction montages that pops up near the movie’s beginning and that none of those women was played by Vanessa Paradis.