The Ugly Truth

Why is it that Meg Ryan faking an orgasm in a restaurant—an unlikely situation, I think we could all agree—is hilarious, a classic that no one will ever forget, while Katherine Heigl having an involuntary orgasm in a restaurant as a result of forgetting to take off her vibrating knickers just lies there, flat, dead on arrival? I sure don’t know, but that’s the case. Nothing in this movie works. Not one joke. I disliked everyone in it, to the extent that I thought about them at all. No chemistry between Heigl and Gerard Butler, which makes their inevitable falling-in-love scene fall as flat as a pair of vibrating knickers with dead batteries. In fact, the only enjoyment I got from this movies was the chance to use the word “knickers” in a review, a word that I think is much superior to the American “panties.” Don’t you?

And what’s the deal with this Gerard Butler? He’s Scottish, and here he looks something like a chipmunk with acorns in his cheeks. The previous movies I’ve seen him in are the horrible, horrible 300, where he was pumped up like a steroid freak and spent the whole movie screaming with the cords on his neck standing out, comic-book style … and The Phantom of the Opera, if you can believe it, where he sang. And apparently he did his own singing. I thought he wasn’t a very good choice … but what the heck, he was in a mask most of the time, so I guess it hardly mattered.