If there was ever a genre that needed serious reinvention, it is the modern romantic comedy. Aside from (500) Days of Summer, the rom-com has been a squalid and stagnant cesspool not unlike the putrid sump in Kurosawa’s Drunken Angel (pardon the film geek reference). While I’m all for change, I don’t think the sudden emergence of the rom-com/action movie hybrid is the way to go. This summer we’ll see Knight and Day (with Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz) and Killers (with Ashton Kutcher and Katherine Heigl), both of which feature a ‘girl meets boy, boy turns out to be highly trained assassin’ plots. April sees the release of Date Night this complete failure of a film, The Bounty Hunter.
Jennifer Aniston is Nicole Hurley, a newspaper reporter, and Gerard Butler is Milo Boyd, a former cop turned bounty hunter following their messy divorce. They hate each other so much that it takes them about an hour and a half to realize how much they really love each other. Sorry, did I forget to mention spoiler alert?
Anyways, Nicole is working on a riveting story about parking tickets. Through a series of contrived events this leads her onto the trail of dirty cops and stolen evidence. She winds up skipping a court date for a traffic violation. Milo gleefully accepts the job and their romance is rekindled while the bad guys shoot at them. The paper thin story is filled out by a few subplots involving Jason Sudeikis as an overly amorous co-worker of Nicole’s, Milo’s gambling addiction, and the loan sharks he owes.
The Bounty Hunter is basically a poor man’s version of Midnight Run, except Butler is no Robert DeNiro and Jennifer Aniston is way hotter than Charles Grodin. But, that’s not nearly enough to elevate the film above it formulaic rom-com trappings. The action isn’t good enough to keep things interesting for the guys dragged to the theaters by their dates. Director Andy Tennant (Hitch) just doesn’t have a handle on how to shoot action sequences in a competent manner. The dialogue is purely functional meant to do nothing more than advance the plot and explain everything in great detail, as if the Byzantine screenplay by Sarah Thorp was too much for anyone of below average intelligence to grasp. The comedy consists mainly of Gerard Butler being tasered and punched in the balls.
There are absolutely no redeeming qualities about The Bounty Hunter.
Rating: DUD
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