The Ugly Truth

It takes a certain amount of guts—or maybe just cluelessness—to give a movie a title like The Ugly Truth. If the movie is even remotely disappointing, critics and audiences alike are going to make obvious wisecracks along the lines of, "It's ugly, and that's the truth." As it happens, such dismissals are more than appropriate here. Despite the fact that it features a couple of actors who have proven their worth as romantic leads, The Ugly Truth is a badly botched film on several levels, thanks in no small part to an awful script.

Where to begin? Well, let's start with the uncanny coincidences that get the movie going.

Katherine Heigl as Abby Richter

Katherine Heigl, who played an up-and-coming celebrity interviewer in Knocked Up, now plays Abby Richter, an uptight TV producer whose news program has slipped in the ratings big-time. Abby also hasn't had a boyfriend in ages, and she seems oblivious to the possibility that her control-freak ways might be scaring away the few men that she does meet. (She not only runs background checks on these guys; she discusses this with them on the first date.) One night, before going to bed, her cat steps on the remote control and Abby happens to catch the tail end of a phone-in talk show hosted by Mike Chadway (Gerard Butler), a boorish bloke who says all men are pigs and women should get used to that fact—oh, and if any female caller doesn't have a man in her life, Mike figures she's probably ugly.

Ticked off by these statements, Abby phones in to complain, but Mike's confident rebuttals just make her more upset. And then, the next day, Abby goes to work and discovers that, as chance would have it, her bosses have already hired Mike to join their morning news show—because boorish men behaving badly should have just as much appeal when audience members are getting up and going to work as they do when frat boys and lonely people of all genders are staying up late into the wee hours of the morning, right?

Gerard Butler as Mike Chadway

Since Abby had phoned Mike's show anonymously, she lets him know that it was she who called in the night before, and so the head-butting between them resumes. But then, miracle of miracles, no sooner has Mike joined her workplace, full of lessons on what men and women are "really" like, than Abby meets her hunky new neighbor Colin (Eric Winter), and she dangles him in front of Mike as an example of how female fantasies really can come true. There's just one slight problem: Abby hasn't actually dated the guy yet. So she and Mike make a deal: He will teach her how to behave the way he thinks a woman ought to behave, and if this helps her to hook up with Colin, then he, Mike, will quit his job.

That's all contrived enough as it is. But if it were only the first half-hour that were this phony—if the set-up created a space in which genuinely funny character moments could take place—the movie would at least be somewhat bearable. As it is, the film is simply never even remotely believable, and you never get the sense that anyone involved has tried to think through the characters and how they would behave if they were real people.

You see this, for example, in the way Mike perpetually charges through his TV appearances in ways that catch his producers off-guard, whether he's diagnosing the problem with his married co-hosts' sex life or walking outside the studio where—surprise!—a couple of women are wrestling in a pool full of Jell-O right outside the door. (Did no one at the station notice this before the show went live? Does no one there ever think to keep an eye on Mike and whatever stunts he might be setting up?) You also see it in the way that Abby never even thinks to tell Colin where she is staying, after she cancels their big weekend date to go out of town on assignment. By this point, the film has established that Abby is desperate for sex—she and Colin were planning to do it for the first time that weekend—and the film has also established that Colin doesn't mind tagging along when last-minute changes of plan at work interfere with their dating life. So why wouldn't Abby at least stay in touch with him?

Abby falls for the new hunky neighbor (Eric Winter)

Well, there is a reason for that last little lapse, but it has nothing to do with the characters and everything to do with the screenwriters moving bits of plot around so that they can crank out another highly predictable, highly formulaic "romantic comedy." And that, in turn, requires both Abby and Mike to undergo changes of heart that come out of nowhere and ring very false the moment they transpire. (The script is credited to Nicole Eastman, Karen McCullah Lutz, and Kirsten Smith, the latter two of whom had much more success with 10 Things I Hate about You and the original Legally Blonde. Heck, even their script for The House Bunny was more inspired than this—and that's saying something.)

To their credit, the writers do come up with the occasional good idea; they just don't do anything interesting with them. Case in point: Mike lives with his sister and her son, and he calls himself "the only father figure" the boy has. This is an intriguing bit of character development, and it would be interesting to know what Mike's sister makes of his coarse, sexist rants on TV—let alone what she makes of the idea that he is some sort of role model for her son. But the movie never follows up on this; instead, the writers seems to have introduced these characters simply because being "good with kids" will make Mike more attractive to Abby, no matter how crude his behavior is in other ways.

As if the contrived premise and the unbelievable characters weren't enough, the movie is also saddled with consistently coarse dialogue. Not coarse in the sense of four-letter words, though there are a handful of those, but coarse in the sense that the conversations frequently turn to certain body parts and the things that are done with them. This may not be the most extreme film in the world, as far as that goes, but the prominence of such below-the-belt humor—combined with the complete absence of wit or nuance—is quite striking in a genre that is supposed to be all about falling in love. Audiences, like people, need to be seduced, but this film goes the caveman route and clubs us over the head.

Sparks fly, in more ways than one, between Abby and Mike

In a way, the film is, itself, a perfect embodiment of Mike's philosophy, albeit translated to a different forum. One of the first things Mike tells us is, "Men are simple." In other words, he would have us believe that men just want sex, and that they want it as animalistically as possible. (No candlelight dinners, please!) Likewise, the makers of The Ugly Truth seem to think that audiences are simple. They would have us believe that audiences just want jokes and hints of sexuality, and that they want those things as dumb and crass as possible. Mike's message to women is that men just want to get into their pants, and the studio's message to the ticket-buying audience is that it just wants to get into their wallets. Don't let them.

Talk About It

1. Mike justifies all the coarse things he says by saying that he is telling "the truth." Is he right? Even if he is, would that justify the things he says or the way he says them?
   
   
2. Abby has a "checklist" of things that she is looking for in a lover. Is it wise to have such a list before you have met someone? How flexible should such "checklists" be? What would God have us look for in a potential mate?
   
   
3. Are men and women necessarily as different as Mike says, and as the opening titles suggest? Are men never motivated by their hearts, or women by their bodies?
   
   

1. Why do you think the stereotypes advocated by Mike persist? Does the film ever challenge them in the end? Who "wins" the argument in the end: Mike or Abby? Both? Neither?
   
   

The Family Corner

The Ugly Truth is rated R for sexual content (a man's naked rear end, a woman experiences an orgasm in public when a boy finds the remote control for her vibrating underwear, a man and woman are shown in bed together) and language (about a dozen four-letter words, and much discussion of male and female body parts and what people do with them).

Photos © Columbia Pictures

Copyright © 2009 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.