THE TRUTH ABOUT LOVE

The Truth About Love seems to have been written by an overgrown man-child who just can't get over the words he can use without his mum catching him.

The Truth About Love has to be one of the worst movies ever made. It's not even a tragic failure where you can tell that everyone meant well and gave their best effort. It's just a poorly-written, badly-acted movie based upon a half-witted idea.

Jennifer Love Hewitt stars as Alice, a young English woman with terribly unfortunate hair. It looks like a pom-pom, and accentuates her pointy face. She's a sweet, but timid, health professional who's married to an asshole lawyer. Luckily Asshole Lawyer (Jimi Mistry) has a positively saintly best friend named Archie (Dougray Scott), and he's in love with Alice. On the spur of the moment, he sends her an anonymous Valentine, which she assumes is from her husband. To play along, Alice sends her husband an anonymous Valentine, but when he opens it, he tries to distract her, then hides it in his coat and dashes off to work. Uh-oh. What's he hiding?

Alice then buys a cell phone and starts placing anonymous phone calls to her husband. The plan is to see if he would cheat on her...or something. I'm not entirely sure why Alice thinks this is such a hot idea, but her best friend (Kate Miles) is all for it. The best friend is also so slutty that you'd want to throw away your chairs after she sat on them. Ecchh.

Using a deep monotone, Alice talks dirty to her husband and arranges a meeting with him. Even though her voice has all the sex appeal and inflection of a computer, Asshole Lawyer thinks she's very naughty and falls right into her trap. He's perfectly willing to cheat on both his wife and his mistress. He's even willing to make out with a stranger while blindfolded! Ewww! The stranger is Alice in disguise, but anything could have been behind that weird voice.

From here we spend a lot of time watching Alice try to save her marriage. Why? Clearly hubby is a sleazeball, but it takes awhile for Alice to grasp this concept. Then, when it's obvious that she should fall into Archie's arms, she's equally blind to the fact that he loves her. Watching this feeble girl sort out her love life is so tiresome that you just about want to hit yourself over the head with a rolling pin.

The Truth About Love seems to have been written by an overgrown man-child who just can't get over the words he can use without his mum catching him. "Look at me! I can write an entire movie around naughty words! Knob! Naked! Nipple! Knob again!" This is neither titillating nor offensive—just juvenile. Even the case A.L. is working on centers around swingers and threesomes. Is this some sort of watered down porn movie? And if it is, what the heck is Jennifer Love Hewitt doing in it?

Making matters worse, the voices of the characters are inexplicably bizarre. They appear to live in London, but everybody seems to be struggling with a secondary accent. French? Scottish? Freakish? At times they sound like record players running at the wrong speed, but I could see no technical reason that would explain this. Eventually it was all too much, and I wound up in a fit of giggles at some critical moment in Alice's struggle. How in the world did this movie get made? Jennifer and Dougray seem like nice people, but they would have done well to sit this one out. So would you.