Erratic

Rating: 5/10 (29 July 2009)

I have just come from a movie theater where I saw the new romantic comedy "The Ugly Truth" starring Katherine Heigl and Gerard Butler. It was directed by Robert Luketic with three screen writers, two of whom worked with the director on an earlier hit, LEGALLY BLONDE.
With a title that suggests the great Leo MacCarey comedy THE AWFUL TRUTH, this movie has been taking an awful lot of criticism, mostly directed at Miss Heigl, a beautiful and competent actress who has, it seemed, been called upon to carry a script which is mostly distinguished by the fact that her character, as written, is composed of a number of seemingly immiscible characteristics, none of which are ever sorted out; and which seems to attempt to move between standard screwball, standard romantic comedy, with occasional Farrelly-Brothers-style freak-out jokes tossed in, with no presagement, rhyme nor reason.
The whole thing ends in such a predictable manner in a sky filled with balloons that the film might have been written by simply taking discarded parts of other scripts and tossing them in.
In short, while Miss Heigl does not distinguish herself in this indistinguishable mess, laying the blame at her feet strikes me as cruel and foolish. While she is given an 'executive producer' credit, there are a total of eleven producers on this film, which is up near the John Woo level. Miss Heigl carries out her acting assignment competently, and she has good chemistry with Mr. Butler. While she has appeared in other romcoms to better effect -- I did enjoy 27 DRESSES -- surely her job as an actor is not to rewrite the script, nor to insist on a character that makes sense, but to perform the role in a manner as plausible as possible, to milk the funny lines for what they are worth and to be generally of interest when she is on screen. She accomplishes the last, but surely the fact that her character makes no sense and that the gags are thrown in at random cannot be laid at her feet.
Mr. Butler is given a much more interesting role, that of a chauvinist pig whose TV producer Miss Heigl is forced to become. However, the audience is swiftly assured that this is simply a pose to cover a warm heart and Miss Heigl comes to recognize this gradually -- and telling the audience quickly and Miss Heigl slowly is another problem with the script.
There is also the third wheel, played by Eric Winter, who plays an unattached doctor with a body that looks like he spends three or four hours a day working on his abs. Although my early assumption that he would turn out to be gay were not borne out, he serves no real impediment to Mr. Butler's and Miss Heigl's inevitable romance.
The result is that this is a poor but fitfully watchable romcom, distinguished mostly by Mr. Butler's macho maundering on What Men Really Want. If you miss it, you won't miss much, but I doubt if the actively painful scenes -- including the aftermath of a discussion of masturbation that the Farrelly Brothers would reject as neither funny nor realistic --will cause you to walk out of the theater.