You ain't got no alibi

Rating: 1/10 (29 July 2009)

"It's a little sexist. It paints the women as shrews, as humourless and uptight, and it paints the men as lovable, goofy, fun-loving guys... I'm playing such a bitch; why is she being such a killjoy?" The Ugly Truth star Katherine Heigl there, talking to 'Vanity Fair' in 2007 about Judd Apatow's 'Knocked Up.'
Fast-forward a couple of years, and stone me, if Heigl's not playing another shrewish, humourless and uptight media-professional, in yet another opposites-attract romantic comedy. Is this her idea of progress? If she's atoning for her early role in 1994's American remake of 'My Father, The Hero', in which her 14-year-old character wears a white, one-piece thong bikini while claiming her dad Gérard Depardieu is actually her lover in order to appear more womanly to boys, then perhaps it is. But right now Heigl's range is proving slightly more limited than John Wayne's, who at least played both a Mongolian *and* an ancient Roman with a Madison County accent.
Heigl plays Abby Richter, a Sacramento breakfast TV show producer, and the kind of frightening valkyrie who background-checks her dates. This glamorous professional remains inexplicably single - until the execs pair her up with shouty shock jock Mike Chadway (a dodgy-accented Gerard Butler) to boost the ratings with his lame 'Men are from Bars, Women Need a Penis' shtick. Chadway's 'Ugly Truth' segment claims to spill the beans about the sexes while advising pent-up women to flick the same. "Men are simple, they cannot be trained! You wanna win a man over, you don't need ten steps, you just need blowjobs!" While women who want 'relationships' are advised to talk dirty, dress like Streetwalker Barbie and "get a StairMaster". Given that Mike has already called Abby a "dog" and a "lesbian", what happens next is frankly extraordinary: the shriekingly strange control freak falls for her neighbour, the young orthopaedic doctor Colin (Eric Winter), and challenges Mike to be her very own Cyrano-in-an-earpiece. And, well, we all know how 'Roxanne' turned out. (Or not: Mike doesn't actually get off with Colin.)
If one were to take a buzzsaw to The Ugly Truth, its arterial spray would drip down the wall to form the coagulated word 'Generic'. Among 37,000 similar rom-coms, it is markedly close to 2001's 'Someone Like You', in which Ashley Judd uses roommate Hugh Jackman's womanising outlook as raw material for her sexist advice column. And then falls in love with him. This lack of any originality whatsoever wouldn't be so insulting if there existed any actual chemistry between the leads; if the supporting cast weren't as slight as snowflakes (wimpy Colin is barely even human); or if, with its trash-mouth, oral-sex gags and casting, it didn't so desperately and transparently want to be a Judd Apatow movie. Just one without the insight. Or soul. Or wit. Or anything. Why is Mike in love with Abby? "Beats the s*** out of me, but I am." And that, boys and girls, is how you tidily dispose of character development when your script ain't worth a fart.
Its leading lady exec-produced this (rarely a promising sign), and so did her mum, but this film seemingly exists only to utterly humiliate Heigl via three farcical set-pieces; the lowlight of which sees her remote-controlled vibrating sex knickers (a gift from Mike, with the honest-to-goodness words "this isn't for you, it's for your bean") being 'accidentally' activated while she's out having dinner with clients. Meg Ryan's got nothing to worry about but Nora Ephron should sue. "Thanks for coming tonight" says Mike. "For dinner. That kind of coming." Sure, we get it. Who wrote these gags, David Brent? Well actually, a trio of women wrote this film (two of them also being the brains behind 'Legally Blonde', 'She's The Man' and 'The House Bunny'), demonstrably proving that chauvinism isn't the sole preserve of one sex.