Fairly generic and obvious but still passable on a sort of genre level

Rating: Null/10 (22 August 2010)

The Ugly Truth is summed up by the poster which sees the two stars leaning and turning their bodies away from one another in the time-honoured way that suits a film that has no intention of doing anything new or challenging but rather just turning out what the viewer expects. So it is that two people who initially hate each other are forced by a plot device to spend time together – I wonder if it is possible that they will somehow fall for each other at some point? No, surely not, I mean they clearly dislike each other from what I can see.
And so it goes. Anyone who cannot see where the film is going within 5 minutes (or even just the poster) has simply never seen a film in this genre before – because it does almost exactly what you expect from start to finish. Along the way we have comic misunderstandings that are as basic as they are elaborately set up and of course a general emerging chemistry developing – none of which will be a surprise to the vast majority of viewers. The plot is secondary to the comedy though and in this way the film does have a certain obvious charm to it thanks mainly to the enthusiasm of Heigl in the lead role. She is likable and she commits to delivering the material and really does sell it in the most part. It is a shame that the supporting cast (including several famous faces) could not have been better used to deliver lots of side laughs to strengthen the film, but they were still reasonably good.
Butler overplays his "gruff real man" role, slurping his coffee quickly used as a character shorthand – stuff like that. I didn't really like him that much and I don't really see the appeal – nor did I think he worked particularly well with Heigl, although this was perhaps down to the base material more than just his performance. He does what the material asks of him though, so in regard I guess he is OK for the film. As I said, seeing people like Hines, Higgins, Brown and others not really given the material to work with was a shame – normally a cast is populated with people like this so they can provide colour and one-liners in the background to help provide a sort of comedy base for the main plot and cast, this wasn't really the case here.
So The Ugly Truth does just what you expect it to do across a film filled with the elaborate and unlikely comedy situations that you can see coming and often hope don't arrive. It is not a particularly good film but it is not a bad one – just about doing enough to provide the easy, undemanding and instantly forgettable genre fill that the majority of viewers will have come to it for.