The Ugly Truth

In a book that does not exist, there is a chapter called "Bad screenwriting 101" and in this chapter exists a section that discusses abandoning character traits because it is convenient to the script. When this book and chapter exist, The Ugly Truth will be used as an example in that section.

Abby(Katherine Heigl) is a frazzled, neurotic, obsessive compulsive who knows how to ruin dates better than I do. She is the producer of a Sacramento morning show and the ratings for the show are tanking. In order to save the show, her boss wants to bring in Mike(Gerard Butler) who has a cable access show called The Ugly Truth. His show is based around the idea that men only care about sex and only want hot girls. He says words that I am pretty sure cable access people are not allowed to say, but this is a movie, after all. Of course, Abby's reaction is not positive as Mike appears to represent everything wrong with men. Abby has met the perfect man, Colin(Eric Winter, who is a doctor with a chiseled figure and loves cats. Mike can see that Abby has no idea what she is doing and he agrees to help. If Abby gets the guy, she leaves Mike alone, if she doesn't get Colin, Mike will quit. Abby agrees and soon she is shopping for bras and dresses that show off that wonderful cleavage of hers. She starts eating hot dogs in a suggestive manner and Mike tries to loosen the girl up with vibrating underwear. As the ratings of her show skyrocket, Mike becomes a valued commodity and gets a shot at national late night with an appearance on Craig Ferguson. As much as Abby hates Mike at the opening, Mike loves Abby by this time in the movie. Lies are told, Mike quits, then the truth comes out and a wonderfully cheesy ending happens, in a hot air balloon no less!

Mike believes in telling the truth, no matter what. He is crude, raw and obnoxious. He calls everything exactly like he sees it and is not afraid to step on toes or ruffle feathers. Again, he always tells the truth no matter how hard it is to hear. Well, almost always. In the ONE moment of the movie where the truth matters most, the writers write for him to lie. They ask him to completely abandon everything he stands for to lie because the movie needs him to lie in this one moment. He goes right back to telling the truth, but in this one moment, he lies. he lies because the movie would be robbed of its horribly perfect ending if he told the truth in this moment. Without him lying, the couple would not end up in a hot air balloon with a gorgeous back drop for them to mend the fences. It is one of those super annoying ROM-COM contrivances that the genre needs to survive. Characters need to lie or withhold truth in key moments because talking it out would just be too easy.

That being said, The Ugly Truth is, well, no it sucks. It is a bad movie that asks Katherine Heigl to reduce herself to a fumbling, bumbling series of twitches and idiosyncrasies and asks us to believe Katherine Heigl's beauty is nothing compared to her own psychotic neurosis. It turns Gerard Butler into some run of the mill Dane Cook. yes, the entire movie I thought, "Shouldn't Dane Cook be the star?" It is an R rated ROM-COM with no input from Judd Apatow and that is pure Dane Cook territory. Butler, doing a admirable job masking his accent, does nothing terribly charming, but he does swear a lot. He is not afraid of any slang word for the male and female anatomy. Oh, but the lovely screen writers realize we have to at least kind of like him, so what do they do? They give him a nephew! He is very good with his nephew, so see, he is really sensitive. He was probably just burned by a girl or two, right? Right. His entire 20s were full of bad bad women.

It is hard to believe this movie was written by women. It is hard to believe that the same women who wrote a movie about a blonde girl who was perceived as dumb going to Harvard Law and becoming Valedictorian, wrote this movie that calls all women annoying, vapid and not worthy of love. Or that the same women who wrote a movie about a former playboy bunny turning a bunch of misfit girls into a bunch of cool and confident girls, could write a movie where Katherine Heigl has to have an orgasm in the middle of a restaurant because of vibrating panties, girl power, indeed! Meg Ryan faking an orgasm in the middle of a diner is funny, Katherine Heigl pretending to have an actual orgasm at a table full of guys, just kind of embarrassing.

My last and possibly biggest issue is just how quickly The Abby character warms up to Mike. I do not have a problem with them falling in love because opposites do attract, but as soon as Abby agrees to Mike's game she becomes incredibly comfortable around him. She is a totally tightly wound woman, yet on her first time out with Mike helping her, she is perfectly fine with him smacking her ass and talking about her breasts. She seems to enjoy it far too quickly considering the character we met at the beginning of the film. Maybe something was edited out or maybe (most likely) the people writing this abomination just do not care about character and they are certainly not concerned that they are insulting the intelligence of their audience.

Final Grade: D- (Only Katherine Heigl's body in her black dress saves it from an F)

P.S. Why set a movie in Sacramento and have it look nothing like Sacramento? They could have at least taken some B-roll of the capitol or something.