"The Ugly Truth" (2009) - Movie Review

The few people reading this part of the web would have noticed that I have been skipping certain new releases. I decided to do that in the view of waiting for other reviews to give a moderate to better reviews. I did not wanted to take any more chances and waste of course the cash in these tough times. I got fooled before and it happens again. These things happen and I apologize to myself for that. “The Ugly Truth” makes Katherine Heigl one more time a desperate woman hard to find love. Where are these women in my town, I do not know but looks like Sacramento has Heigl’s Abby, a news producer soon settling in for anything for better TV ratings. She meets the obnoxiously alpha male Mike Chadway(Gerard Butler) brought as the talent to salvage their sinking ship. And you get the gist.

I sometimes wonder how many times I have the material to write horrible reviews for horrible films. It seem to be outgrowing the limitations of the vocabulary I manage to learn as the day goes by. Relationships are complex and human behaviour is even more so. That complexity, variety is what makes the industry of art coming up with great works without seeming to exhaust. Yet in that subject matter, there is a standard. Take that factor of desperation and insufficiency in the people we would have hard time believing to be trouble with to follow the line. The end is the same, a public display of affection with the music that seems more manipulative than a reality show.

In this film comes Gerard Butler using his uncontrolled flow of words to the little box. He simply puts forth that heterosexual men’s brain cells are nothing but moving images of opposite sexes naked. That indeed is the ugly truth and yet there is this concept of hurt and love. Mike himself seems to be a product of the bad relationships for which the obvious reaction is to denigrate women and have some pleasure in it. He has made his life such way. Now director Robert Luketic do not want to make him a complete jerk and men like these are not. He has a sister and nephew to show his “other” side. And of course Abby has to see that and we could tick that “it” will one reason for them being a happy couple.

In the end Butler’s Chadway summates that desperate women are there but with a checklist. So what about men? Oh Wait. We are always desperate and settle for anything. Now, as I have repeated myself numerous times, this is a film much like the mindless summer block buster and looking for meaning is an idiotic thing. And again, I repeat that any commonly ran films can be interesting, intelligent and may be a little profound. The expectation of shallowness in a film does not excuse its ludicrous formula sentimentality.

As there are stereotypic men are stereotypic women. It turns out the check list guy Colin (Eric Winter) whom Abby dates with the help of Chadway is one of them. He says how much of a pleasure to have someone not demanding little things and be particular as Abby does. And well, Mike falls for her and rightly said it beats the sh*t of him. Abby has issues, serious ones and as much as bad is Chadway a representation of men, so is Abby. In that sense the movie resolves as it should, settling for low cheap shot they are content with.

The writer for this borefest are not one but three people. Karen McCullah Lutz, Kirsten Smith and Nicole Eastman. I wonder what immense effort it took for them to weave this procedure of monotony. If they are out there for names and money, which most of them are, they are in the right track. If they settled for this complacency, it is heart breaking. I would prefer a screenwriter who went for a complete different play and failed miserably in the making than successful businessperson recycling garbages.