The Ugly Truth (2009)

In some ways, The Ugly Truth isn’t too far afield from a classic Hepburn-Tracy romantic comedy like Woman of the Year. We have a bickering male and female fighting an iconic battle of the sexes even as they fall in love. And as in those films of yesteryear, the sexual politics get a bit confused in The Ugly Truth. But the new film doesn’t have Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. It has Katherine Heigl and Gerard Butler. And the script isn’t by, let’s say, Ring Lardner Jr. It’s by first-time screenwriter Nicole Eastman and the team that wrote Legally Blonde and The House Bunny. These distinctions help to explain why The Ugly Truth won’t ever be regarded as a classic. Heigl plays a TV producer who’s a stereotypical control freak and Butler the brusque new talent under her charge, a Neanderthal grunting out primitive sexual politics, which he calls “the ugly truth.” Even setting aside that these nasty archetypes aren’t very helpful, socially, The Ugly Truth is formulaic and unfunny.