REVENGE is a dish best served ice-cold and in generous portions in Nick Cassavetes’s romantic comedy of spiteful sisterly solidarity. For the first hour, it’s a tasty dish laced with tart oneliners by screenwriter Melissa Stack, who deftly sketches the emotional bonds between a wife and the two other women, who have unknowingly slept with her skirt-chasing husband.

These early scenes, in which the embittered spouse surfs a tidal wave of rage while the two mistresses wrestle with their guilt, achieve a pleasing blend of painful home truths and ribald humour.

“You had sex with my husband 50 times?!” shrieks the wife when she learns about the impressively gymnastic nature of her husband’s relationship with one of his bits on the side.

“Don’t you have a job? Or hobbies?” she caterwauls.

Carly Whitten (Cameron Diaz) is a high-flying attorney with a sassy personal assistant (Nicki Minaj), who aptly describes her boss as “a ruthless law-robot”. Carly falls for a handsome charmer called Mark (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), but her decision to surprise him in a sexy outfit leads to the discovery that he’s married with a wife Kate (Leslie Mann), who gave up her job for her man.

Carly and Kate discover that Mark has been cheating on both of them with another woman, Amber (Kate Upton).

The Other Woman fails to deliver in a messy and unsatisfying final act that skids wildly out of control and muddies the underlying message of female empowerment.

Diaz and Mann spark appealing screen chemistry and Coster-Waldau possesses the right amount of charm and slipperiness to convince us that he could deceive so many women, and almost get away with it.

Upton is surplus to requirements, but does provide a predictable final punch line for Carly’s ageing, five-times divorced father (Don Johnson).