Standard Rom-Com or Gross-Out Comedy? A Belabored Movie That Can't Make Up Its Mind

Rating: 3/10 (15 November 2009)

This 2009 movie proves that women - in this case, screenwriters Nicole Eastman, Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith - can write romantic comedies just as poorly as men can. As directed by Robert Luketic ("Legally Blonde"), the idea behind this misfire is to cross-pollinate the most tired conventions of the female-focused genre with the sensibilities of the recent spate of raunchy, man-boy comedies, this latter genre having found its unequivocal leader in Judd Apatow. However, unlike Apatow, who has figured out how to make films that are insightful as well as funny like "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" and "Knocked Up" (ironically featuring this film's star, Katherine Heigl), Luketic shows no such finesse as everything in this film feels labored with the principal actors Heigl and Gerard Butler overplaying their opposites-attracts roles to near-cartoon proportions. Moreover, there are so many absurd gross-out gags inserted in this film that it feels like the creators (including executive producer Heigl) completely miscalculates who its target audience appears to be.
The strictly by-the-numbers plot centers on Abby Richter, an uptight, overachieving producer for a ratings-challenged morning talk show in, of all places, Sacramento. Her workplace is full of the stock characters you would expect in this type of formulaic movie - the demanding station manager, the show's vainglorious co-hosts with empty smiles and non-ironic deliveries, the inane segments that make up Abby's struggling show. Predictably, her personal life is burdened by an incessant, programmatic search for Mr. Right, and consequently, her one-time dates become a series of qualification interviews. Prospects don't look much better at work with her show's ratings, and so enters local cable-access celebrity, Mike Chadway, a chauvinist personality who regales in providing sexist advice on what men are really looking for in women. Naturally, it comes down to guys wanting nothing but sex and how women should do everything they can to encourage it.
Ratings rise based on the prurient content and Mike's unapologetic behavior, and even Abby recognizes his prowess in tapping into the public's psyche, so much so that on a stay-or-get-fired wager, Mike convinces her that he can be her Cyrano to help her land her neighbor, a handsome doctor who meets all of Abby's superficial qualifications. As tired as the premise sounds (and it is), the movie's pain points are exacerbated by the constant need to humiliate Abby, mainly through simulations of sexual acts in public. Obviously a knock-off of Meg Ryan's fake orgasm scene in "When Harry Meets Sally", the most notoriously contrived episode involves a pair of electronic panties that cause her to writhe uncontrollably in front of her corporate sponsors. Heigl seems to be playing the same model of efficiency in all her big-screen roles, and as Abby, she plays her stereotype on hyper-drive, for instance, hanging upside down from a tree in her underwear or doing her happy dance repeatedly.
Burying his Scottish brogue under an accent that sounds suspiciously like Mel Gibson's, Butler should be careful about accepting roles like Mike because he could otherwise turn into a Matthew McConaughey-type of actor, a promising career start ("Dear Frankie") followed by bad commercially-driven choices. The other actors make little impression with even the comic talents of John Michael Higgins and Cheryl Hines wasted as the shallow talk show co-hosts. The ending is predictable and poorly matted on a hot-air balloon, and the denouement brings an unnecessarily cynical exclamation point to the whole venture. The 2009 DVD is unsurprisingly, mostly filler - a gag reel, a set of alternative endings, and a couple of featurettes – the first about the differences in the male and female points of view and the second about the apparent hilarity in making this film. I'm glad the cast and crew had a good time, me not so much.