Not Pretty

While romantic comedies are known to stray far from the realm of reality, “The Ugly Truth” could not be further from it.

Katherine Heigl, as Abby, plays what has become her stock character – an uptight, career-driven yet socially defective woman obsessed with finding her Prince Charming (and failing miserably at it). Luckily, audience members are not left to worry about her well-being for long.

Enter Mike, played by Gerard Butler, a crass television personality who’s been hired to host a segment on the morning TV show Abby produces.

Mike, with his infinite wisdom about the shallowness of the male psyche, becomes the tutor to Abby’s poor relationship-snagging strategies. (She’s a woman so out of touch that she treats a dinner date more akin to a job interview.)

Predictably, Mike and Abby butt heads for the first 95 percent of the film, only to find – during the span of one sexy dance at a restaurant in San Francisco – that they are perfect for one another.

The most frustrating aspect of this film is a familiar one: the female lead bending over backward, changing everything from the size of her personality to the length of her hair in her quest to find Mr. Right, while her male counterpart does little more than spout misogynist criticisms, crack a few crude jokes and provide some predictable, albeit effective, advice on his path to true love.

It seems that audiences are no closer to seeing a reversal of roles in which a woman succeeds in bringing a man to her level rather than the other way around. (To the movie industry’s credit, I spent much of “The Ugly Truth” trying to come up with a movie in which this is accomplished but came up with nothing.)

Would it be too much to ask for two characters to meet in the middle?

As actors, Heigl and Butler are likeable enough, but the movie’s cliche material and the characters’ exaggerated gender roles are neither memorable nor interesting.

The film’s female writers, in what appears to be a too-earnest effort to prove they can play with the Judd Apatows of the movie world, created a script rife with raunchy jokes that seem misplaced and just plain clumsy.

The scene that provides the most potential for humor involves prudish Abby putting on a pair of vibrating panties just before she is swept off to a business dinner.

For reasons unimportant and unexplained, the underwear’s remote becomes an extra guest to the meal, and things get interesting when it’s picked up off the floor by a kid sitting at the next table.

While it’s amusing to watch Abby squirm in this ridiculously implausible situation, the in-crowded-restaurant orgasm has been done before – and far better – by Meg Ryan in “When Harry Met Sally.”

The truth might be ugly, but this film isn’t any prettier. Its story has been done a hundred times over, and at least a few times (as in 2001’s “Someone Like You”) with wit, supporting characters who possess depth and charm and – rarer still – a smidge of believability behind the romance.