The Ugly Truth

The Ugly Truth was directed by Robert Luketic (Legally Blonde), from a script by Nicole Eastman and the team of Kirsten Smith and Karen McCullah Lutz, "The Ugly Truth" is an arch, contrived, entirely predictable romantic comedy assembled with sufficient audience-friendly elements to put it over as both a good girls' night attraction and a date-night enough to leave couples in the right mood afterward. The Ugly Truth is the latest generic romantic comedy from the Hollywood factory. Everyman who doesn't believe in deep relationships meets fussy, high-strung professional woman looking for love.
I think the movie has embarrassingly limited ideas about both the sexes and sex. Like most women in movies right now, Katherine Heigl was born in the wrong decade. She has the misfortune to work in a time when her business values women either as something else for the camera to do. Sixty years ago, she might have been a biggish deal in minor comedies, the way she is now. But she might also have had taller, more charismatic men to star with and better things to be and represent than she does at the start of the 21st century, where she’s stuck playing professionally capable, socially retarded women. Heigl plies her trade in so-called chick flicks, the Lean Cuisine of romantic comedy, and her latest contribution, “The Ugly Truth’’ - or, as I fondly came to think of it, the Baja-style chicken quesadilla (only five Weight Watchers points!) - casts her as an undersexed television news producer named Abby Richter. This is a promotion from being an aspiring TV personality (“Knocked Up’’) and a smitten eco-magazine drone (“27 Dresses’’).
The film explores the truth of who comes out on top in a battle-of-the-sexes scenario, but by the end it's clear that the real truth lies somewhere in the middle. But The Ugly Truth can not escape its own ugly truth, that the central characters are written to extremes both ludicrous and tiring; the sparks that fly between them are totally manufactured.