Film File - The Ugly Truth

Promoted as a movie about 'the battle of the sexes', 'The Ugly Truth' is a comedy about men, women and the giant abyss that stands between the ways they think, fantasize and try to seduce the other. Katherine Heigl, many men's main reason for watching 'Grey's Anatomy', and Gerard Butler, the guy with the pecs from '300', play an unlikely romantic pair who appear to despise each other right from the start. She's out to find a sophisticated dream partner, while he's on a mission to tell women to get real and admit that men have just one thing on their minds. Heigl is Abby Richter, an ambitious morning TV talk show producer on a Sacramento station who prides herself on being able to find an instant solution to any problem - except her own unhappily single status. When it comes to men, she has a flawless track record of failure. When her show suffers a ratings slump, Abby is forced to team with the newly recruited special correspondent Mike Chadway (Butler), a man who pushes more of her buttons with his 'Ugly Truth' segment, promising to spill the beans on what makes men really tick. Her dislike is enhanced when he becomes an instant hit with viewers. Life becomes even more complicated for Abby when she meets her neighbour Colin (Eric Winter), an unwed doctor whom she falls hard for. This is the polar male opposite of Mike Chadway - polite, stylish, well-mannered and not in the least into nude female wrestling. However, in order to snare the good doctor's affections, Abby needs to take some lessons from her irksome work colleague on how best to seduce this man of her dreams. So begins what Hollywood terms 'the cute meet': a pair of people learning about each other through a shared project. No prizes for where we're going here. Former Secretary of State for Nixon's White House and a noted ladies' man of his day, Henry Kissinger once declared that "nobody will ever win the battle of the sexes because there's too much fraternising with the enemy." Director Robert Luketic believes that men and women are all equal but the ugly truth is that there are things men and women need - and sometimes they clash, and it is that difference that makes romance so exciting. 'The Ugly Truth' began with three women screenwriters, Nicole Eastman, Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith, who were communally inspired by the idea of two people who think they despise each other, but as their battle wages, are horrified to find they might also be magnetically drawn to one another. Aimed at the 'Sex & The City' audience who, while waiting for the next sequel about Carrie and her Manolo-loving buddies to come along, 'The Ugly Truth' is a romantic comedy trying hard to recreate a modern Hepburn and Tracy vive with wisecracks and snappy rejoinders. For those who liked 'Knocked Up' and 'The 40-Year Old Virgin', and there are many, this is a decent enough Saturday night date movie for that rainy August weekend. Destined to appeal to the girls' nite out crowd, the appealing combination of Heigl's growing stature as a comedy actress and Butler's well-chiselled pecs should tick most boxes for undemanding viewers. Packed with romantic scenarios involving sexual humour and faked orgasms, the script does allow for a reasonable amount of sexual sparring between the leads, but could have been more equitable towards the often overlooked supporting cast - especially Cheryl Hines and John Michael Higgins as a pair of bickering TV anchors, and Kevin Connolly as a disastrous dinner date. However, for all of its drawbacks, 'The Ugly Truth' does have enough robust chemistry to make it a watery hit - perfect for the kind of weather we've been recently enduring.