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The Ugly Truth Our rating: Your rating: 1 2 3 4 Your Comments: see all MPAA rating: R (for sexual content and language) Genre: Romantic Comedy Theater release: July 24, 2009 by Columbia Pictures Directed by: Robert Luketic Runtime: 1 hour 37 minutes Cast: Katherine Heigl (Abby Richter), Gerard Butler (Mike Chadway), Eric Winter (Colin), Bree Turner (Joy), Cheryl Hines (Georgia), John Michael Higgins (Larry), Nick Searcy (Stuart), Noah Matthews (Jonah) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

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?

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