Hoping to cash in on Gerald Butler’s new status as hansom Scottish heartthrob, The Ugly Truth stars Butler as macho TV personality, Mike Chadway, and Katherine Heigl as a morning show producer whose biggest crime to date is that she’s single. The film charts Abby Richter’s (Heigl) desperation for true love while working in the stressed out world of entertainment. The film lost me on two counts. Firstly the characters occupations sent me in a spin and bored me to tears. Entertainment writers can be so smug in believing that their own working lives are incredibly more interesting and more important than other lives and careers. If the two lead characters were written as working in a restaurant I would have pricked up my ears. And secondly, Richter is a hopeless romantic, of course, and just desperate to find the right man. Every time I see female characters like these I leave the cinema with a puzzled look on my face. Why are these women so desperate to get hitched? But I was also reminded that the jocks in these movies fair no better. These guys are always portrayed as macho, single, and as violently against marriage as their female counterparts are for it.
The ugly truth of The Ugly Truth is that this romantic comedy is a lazy paint-by-numbers tale with our two protagonists starting off disliking one another and then, well you can guess the rest. Both Butler’s charisma and Heigl’s personality are enough, however, to draw in the dating crowd and reap some success at the summer box office.
