The Ugly Truth

There's a moment where The Ugly Truth seems to be self-aware. It comes at the very end, when the lead actors, Katherine Heigl and Gerard Butler, are in a hot air balloon. Well, they're supposed to be in a hot air balloon, but the obvious green screen effect kills the illusion. Their characters have hated each other for most of the movie, but wouldn't you know it, they've started to fall for each other. Butler finally admits his feelings, and Heigl asks him why he's in love with her. He says he doesn't know. That right there is the problem the entire movie has.

The Ugly Truth gives us two characters who share very little romantic on-screen time together, but expects us to want them to get together anyway. Their relationship (which makes up the last 20 minutes or so of the movie) almost seems like an afterthought. Their characters are supposed to be complete polar opposites who despise each other from the get-go, but slowly warm up to each other. I guess the studio is hoping we have short memory spans, and forget we saw this moldy plot just last month in The Proposal. That movie ended up working, thanks to the chemistry of its two stars. Heigl and Butler just don't have the connection to make this movie work. Few actors would. It's an uncomfortable blend of 1940s romantic comedy plotting, and present day raunch and sex humor. At least when this plot was used in the 40s, they spared us the scene when the female lead has an orgasm while trying to give a business speech, because she's wearing electronic vibrating underwear.

Heigl plays Abby Richter, a demanding control freak who produces a low-rated morning news show. She's also unlucky in love, due to the fact she's very controlling and demanding on her dates. Her boss at the TV studio wants to boost the ratings on her show, so he brings Mike Chadway (Butler) onto the team. Mike is the boorish and crude host of a cable access show called The Ugly Truth, where he delights in destroying the myths and ideas of love and relationships. Think Howard Stern giving dating advice, and you've got a pretty good mental picture. Mike is brought on as a regular segment on the news show, and on his very first episode, he ridicules the lead husband and wife news anchors and their sex life. His second segment involves scantily clad women wrestling in a pool of Jell-o. Abby is disgusted, but Mike is a hit, and the show's ratings go through the roof, so she has to keep him on. Mike and Abby are constantly at odds with each other on and off the set. But of course, Mike's not all bad. He looks after his sister's kid, hinting that he has a soft side.

Meanwhile, Abby has fallen for a handsome and seemingly-perfect young surgeon named Colin (Eric Winter), who lives across from her. She meets him when her cat accidentally knocks over her goldfish bowl, she chases the cat outside, it runs up the neighbor's tree, she climbs up after it, sees Colin naked having just gotten out of the shower, falls from the tree, and he treats her injured ankle. (Happens all the time...) Abby thinks she's finally found Mr. Right, but Mike insists she's going about it all wrong, and that if she follows his methods, Colin will fall in love with her. He's so confident Abby will be successful if she does what he says, he's willing to risk his job on the show. Abby agrees, and Mike starts following along on her dates with Colin, feeding her advice through a hidden earpiece microphone. Funny thing, Mike's advice actually works, and her relationship with Colin grows. Another funny thing: Abby and Mike start seeing each other in a different light and realize to their shock (but not ours) that maybe they are the ones who are right for each other. But the funniest thing of all is that the movie forgets to give the two leads a real reason to fall in love with each other. Only reason I could come up with is because the names of the actors playing them are above the title.

It's bad enough that The Ugly Truth follows a well-worn path, but what makes it worse is that there's absolutely nothing for us to care about. Heigl and Butler do what they can with their flimsy characters, but they can only do so much. Butler seems less interested in trying to get Heigl to fall in love with him, and more involved with making sure he doesn't drop out of his fake American accent. The film's screenplay, which is credited to three different women (surprising, given the film's sexist and unflattering view of women it usually has), is also never as funny as it should be. There are a lot of scenes that should be funny (like the previously mentioned vibrating underwear scene), but the energy isn't there, or it goes on too long. It also revels in crude humor and four-letter words, almost as if it thinks these are enough to spice up the cliched formula. It's not, obviously, and it comes across as a strained effort. If the movie cared half as much about its characters as it did about having frank discussions about sexual acts, it might have been on to something.

The worst offense The Ugly Truth pulls is that it is completely uninspired. It's not bad enough to induce rage, but it doesn't really leave any impression. It's yet another in a long line of forgettable Hollywood romantic comedies that have been programmed to be as crowd pleasing as possible, yet end up being completely generic. Things have gotten so sad that The Proposal is staring to look like a shining example of the genre, whereas in better days, it would have been treated as the fluffy little time waster that it is. At least I still remember that movie a month after seeing it. I doubt I'll remember much of The Ugly Truth come August.

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