THE UGLY TRUTH

Stop me if you’ve heard this before: romance unexpectedly blossoms between an uptight professional woman and the boorish man she cannot stand. Sound familiar? It should. This opposites-attract schtick is as old as time and, unfortunately for The Ugly Truth, has also been done much better in better films.

Katherine Heigl, who really needs to expand her cinematic horizons at this point, stars as Abby, a successful-but-uptight-and-lonely morning-show producer at a Sacramento TV station. With ratings in the toilet, the network decides to drop opinionated, sexist, misogynist cable-access host Mike (Gerard Butler) into the morning mix as a way of boosting the show’s share. Abby despises Mike, Mike views Abby as sexually repressed challenge... cue the courtship!

Of course, in order to complicate matters and in an ill-fated bid to make this romantic process more “believable,” the filmmakers throw handsome, too-good-to-be-true Colin (Eric Winter) into the mix. He’s Abby’s dream man and, as soon as he arrives on the scene, she completely loses her s**t. Suddenly, she’s a fumbling, bumbling, moronic mess... to an almost eyeroll-inducing degree. Mike offers to use his sex-it-up approach to help Abby lockdown a relationship with Colin if, in turn, she agrees to keep Mike on the air despite his borderline-offensive approach to women and relationships. Done and done.

Wait. What?

Will it surprise you to learn that the pull of attraction slowly gets stronger as Mike and Abby spend more time together? Or that Mike, with his testosterone-fueled machismo, is actually a pretty sweet guy when you get to know him?

It didn’t surprise me, either.

And therein lies the problem with The Ugly Truth, at least for me: no surprises. The story sticks to a tried-and-true romantic-comedy blueprint, presumably to appease women in the audience, and throws in plenty of crude humor about blow jobs and orgasms and a pair of vibrating underpants (seriously) to, perhaps, keep men in the crowd entertained. None of it felt original or imaginative or clever.

What was a big surprise for me was the fact that this film was co-written by no fewer than THREE women, and executive-produced by Heigl and her mom (!). Honestly, I really expected more given that kind of filmmaking team, especially with Heigl so clearly invested in all aspects of the project.

She’s also played this part before, and doesn’t do anything new or inventive with Abby, who’s not so much a character as a stereotype, as is Mike. But, thanks to Butler and a few tiny moments of nuanced acting, at least his character seems to be rooted a little more in the real world. (And, believe me, I know what a stretch it is to be saying that in the context of this movie.) 

Utterly wasted are supporting players like Cheryl Hines and John Michael Higgins, who co-star as the bickering married hosts of Abby’s morning show, and Bree Turner, whose sweet and likable associate-producer Joy has an unresolved story arc with an obvious conclusion that the writers completely miss. I halfway want to write to them to find out why they leave her where they leave her when her happy ending is practically screaming off the screen. 

Speaking of endings, don’t get me started on the film’s laughable big climax (pun not intended) which is, quite literally and, unfortunately, like much of the film itself, filled with a lot of hot air (pun intended).

Wait for DVD.