For reasons I can't explain, recently Hollywood producers seem so bored with the romantic comedy genre that they've decided they should freshen up the films by adding a lot of really dirty language and imagery to them. At least that's how it feels with a movie like The Ugly Truth. For reasons I can't explain the dialogue in this movie is totally graphic and dirty, while the story is totally recycled crap.
Katherine Heigl is a local news reporter in Sacramento who is forced into hiring public access gross-out host Gerard Butler. Butler's show is about how men and women are looking for different things romantically - that men are looking to get laid and women are looking for love and romance. Long story short, Heigl gets Butler to coach her to be a better sex vixen as she woos her hunky next door neighbor, but, of course the two of them end up falling in love. (I couldn't have guessed that from the movie poster!)
I don't get the appeal of Heigl. I guess she's blond and has big boobs (though her boobs are totally unmemorable to me), but she has absolutely no personality and doesn't have the prettiest face on earth. I don't know - maybe it's the Gray's Anatomization of America. People in lousy television shows go out and make lousy movies and sad people go to see those movies and - voila! A star is born! (Interestingly, Heigl seems to have been born 45 days before me in Washington, DC where I was also born - so I guess I feel some cosmic connection to her.... no -wait - that's gas.)
Nothing really moves in this story. Butler seems to be a good father-figure to his young nephew, but then that story is dropped by the second act; there's a trite Pygmalion sequence where Butler is teaching Heigl how not to be an uptight nerd with men, but that goes nowhere; there's another trite Cyrano de Bergerac sequence where he feeds her lines when she's out with a guy on a date, but this goes nowhere too. It's sorta a 'throw pasta against the wall and see what sticks' approach to narrative structure. It's as if the writers (there are three of 'em!) collected a bunch of tired bits from other movies and put them in a pot to make stew. You get a bit of this and a bit of that in every bite.
What you also get is a totally sophomoric script and a film with an R rating for no purpose. It would not have been much different with tame dialogue and, say, a PG-13 rating. Just because you have an adult concept (which this really isn't) doesn't mean you have to season it with stupid expletives. Sorry to sound like a prude here, but there's a place for everything - and for a dumb rom com, there is no need for the foul language.
Stars: .5 of 4
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