The Bounty Hunter is a romantic comedy thriller so lacking in romance, humor, or intrigue that it makes watching Dog, the Bounty Hunter seem a more appealing choice.
In what could easily be a less funny sequel to last summer’s The Ugly Truth, Gerard Butler plays Milo Boyd, an ex-cop turned unwashed, unshaven bounty hunter who gambles and drinks too much. He’s also ex-husband to intrepid girl reporter Nicole Hurley (Jennifer Aniston). At the start of the film, she’s investigating a mysterious suicide for a story in the New York Daily News but is held up by a pesky court date for a traffic accident. When her source contacts her needing to meet immediately, she skips out on her trial, and a bench warrant is issued for her arrest.
Naturally, Milo’s boss is the bondsman who posted her initial bail, and Milo is the bounty hunter sent to collect her. The prospect fills him with uninhibited glee, an unexplained emotion that Butler plays strangely. He giggles and bounces, tracks mud through her apartment and eats Doritos in her bed. Basically, he’s a douchebag acting like a scorned adolescent.
Milo must eventually track Nicole to Atlantic City, where her mother, Kitty (Christine Baranski), is a headlining lounge singer. While he’s looking for her, all sorts of seedy types are searching for both of them. There’s a crooked cop (Peter Green) out to kill Nicole before she can discover any more about the “suicide”; a bookie (Cathy Moriarty) who’s sent a couple of her goons to break Milo’s kneecaps for his outstanding debt; and a hapless girly-man in a lavender polo shirt (Jason Sudeikis) who’s in love with Nicole after a drunken office-party makeout session.
The Bounty Hunter has stolen plot elements from some of my favorite classic films: His Girl Friday, The Philadelphia Story, and Kiss Me, Kate. Sadly, the script, as penned by Sarah Thorp, does major disservice to all three. In His Girl Friday, for example, the banter between Carey Grant and Rosalind Russell (also exes and also investigative reporters) is smart, tightly written, and delivered at impressive, whiplash-inducing speeds. Thorp, on the other hand, writes unsophisticated innuendo that is snarled and grunted by Butler and chirped cluelessly by Aniston. That is, when Thorp isn’t scripting garbage like Kitty’s line about her daughter’s career-oriented exterior masking a “girl just wanting to be loved by her man.”
The screenplay is so awful that director Andy Tennant is handicapped. Other than shooting close-ups of Aniston’s perky bosom in a transparent tank top and her buns of steel in a restrictively tight skirt (she doesn’t walk, she wiggles), and giving us one blessed, lingering shot of a shirtless Butler, there wasn’t much he could do to add interest to this film. And so it’s left to slowly meander along to its conclusion.
The heavy-handed soundtrack does make an attempt to get us through the ordeal. It plays constantly–I can’t recall a single moment of action or dialogue that isn’t underscored–and acts like a sitcom laugh track, cluing us into what’s supposed to be funny. But it makes things worse at some moments, as when Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On” begins to play (without a hint of irony) in a scene where Milo and Nicole almost do.
I hate to be so critical of Butler. I’ve ogled his goods since Reign of Fire, and I’ve seen 300 about that many times. Unfortunately, not only has he left his sex appeal wherever he left his razor, his efforts at affecting the American accident get worse with every film. At least he had genuine chemistry with Heigl in last year’s version of this same movie. There’s not a single spark with Aniston, who, incidentally, looks more like a lemon-sucking shrew every time I see her.
Thank heavens for Baranski and Carol Kane (as an innkeeper), who appear far too briefly. Thanks to their presence, The Bounty Hunter is able to lay claim to about five enjoyable minutes. The rest of it should be locked up for good.
(Even though The Bounty Hunter sucks, you might want to visit Amazon and pick up some other films by Gerard Butler and Jennifer Anniston. We get a small commission for sending you there, which we’ll use to start a grassroots movement to prevent a sequel to The Bounty Hunter.)
Wow. Hard to shake that one off. But, after reading this review, I cannot WAIT to see the Bounty Hunter. Call me silly, but so many snottilly tossed opinions can lead me to only one conclusion: that the author is a bit negative–a bit of a pessimist–therefore he or she has greatly exaggerated the worthlessness of the film and I must be my own judge.
And, well…I adore Gerard Butler, so…I wouldn’t have listened anyway.