Hard on the spike heels of the lame Sandra Bullock-Ryan Reynolds romantic comedy The Proposal comes yet another battle-of-the-sexes romcom. Difficult though it may be to imagine, The Ugly Truth is much, much worse – a hideously misguided attempt to marry girly chick-flick sentiment with laddish Judd-Apatow-style raunch.
Katherine Heigl and Gerard Butler play the film’s chalk ‘n’ cheese pairing. She’s Abby Richter, the ball-breaking producer for a morning talk show in Sacramento, and he’s Mike Chadway, a boorish cable TV shock jock who’s brought in over her head to pep up the show’s flagging ratings with his merciless pointers to the lovelorn. Sample of his brutal advice to women looking for a man: “Get a Stairmaster.”
Abby is a neurotic, control-freaky singleton; she gets her assistant to do background checks on her internet dates and has a checklist of qualities to be met by her ideal man. Of course, knuckle-dragging Neanderthal Mike ticks none of her boxes: it’s loathe at first sight.
Yet thanks to the kind of contrivance only a team of screenwriters (three, all women) can conceive, when Abby sets her cap at her dreamy surgeon neighbour (Eric Winter), it’s Mike she turns to for tips on how to snag him. Inevitably, he gives her a makeover: taking her shopping, changing her hair and pushing her into a push-up bra. When she goes on a date with the doc, he’s there too, talking into her earpiece to guide her through the necessary manoeuvres; the well-worn Cyrano-steal that Steve Martin pulled off with infinitely more comic panache in Roxanne.
The film’s nadir comes after Mike gives Abby some remote-controlled vibrating underwear as a gift. Somehow, she ends up wearing them to a starchy business dinner and gets her knickers in more than a twist when a kid on a neighbouring table takes hold of the remote.
Naturally, the pair will eventually come around to seeing each other in a different light, but we have to endure yet more witless piffle before they get there. Butler comes through relatively unscathed, but Heigl, so good opposite Seth Rogen’s stoned slacker in Knocked Up, so wasted in this and last year’s 27 Dresses, seems hell bent on squandering her comic gifts.
On general release from 7th August.
To activate the sound in the trailer: hold your cursor over the screen to reveal the control panel and click on the volume control in the bottom right-hand corner.
Have to say I think you let Gerard off lightly in this post. For a romantic comedy to work (for the ladies anyway, and let’s face it that’s who this film is mostly aimed at) the guy has to be loveable, or at the very least likeable. And that’s where this film fatally falls down, GB’s character is a nasty misogynist creep and not only that but he’s the one in need of a few hours on the stairmaster. Butler looks dreadful in this movie (what happened to those cast-iron 300 abs!!) and that fake American accent really grates. When female stars have to starve themselves to toothpick size to keep an audience I think the men should be made to suffer the same. All in the interests of fairness (and decent eye candy) you understand.
I thought Katherine wasn’t too bad, but she was given an impossible part… A smart articulate career woman who does something completely incomprehensible, ie. let’s a creep who she hates run her love life. As if!! Sad to hear this was written by women, they should have known better. A much better example of a rom-com with a similar premise is What Women Want with Mel Gibson and Helen Hunt. While Mel is a bit of an old dog IMHO, I enjoyed this movie because he was the one put through the ringer for his misogynist behaviour and not Hunt. Now that’s what I call female wish fulfilment, what’s fulfilling about seeing a woman brought to her knees (quite literally) by one of these creeps?
Must agree with Heidi. I cannot stand Gerard Butler. His entire persona sends out warning signals – stay away, I’m a knob! AND my friend’s friend worked on that movie and said Butler was arrogant and self-important and treated staff like trash – an utter knob then. Take him away and put him in a zoo with all the other primates.
Blame the screenwriters. They are the ones who created the boorish sexist-pig character Gerard Butler plays, and they heaped all the indignities on Katherine Heigl’s Abby – not least of which was pairing her up with a misogynist creep.