The Bounty Hunter (*½)

Directed by: Andy Tennant

Starring: Gerard Butler, Jennifer Aniston, Christine Baranski, Jason Sudeikis, Jeff Garlin

Seen: April 7^th 2010

*½ Out of ****

As far as romantic comedies go, The Bounty Hunter has very little comedy to speak of, and even less romantic. Is this possibly rather an action buddy comedy with the two leads simply members of the opposite sex? Nope, that still says comedy – something I like to think of as making me laugh at the very least every 5 minutes, not three guffaws during an entire movie.

Milo Boyd (Butler) is a bounty hunter, but he doesn’t seem to be too good at it, as we are shown in the opening scenes of the movie. He is also not a very mean bounty hunter, as they usually tend to be, or are expected to be, but a clumsy idiot kind of bounty hunter. When Sid (Garlin), his bail bonds employer, asks him to do another job Milo almost doesn’t accept it, until he hears who he is to bring in. Nicole Hurley (Aniston) is a career-driven reporter, who gets herself into trouble with her compulsive need to be where the story is happening. She also has an inflated sense of importance of her stories, and sets one of these events above appearing in court one day, skipping her arraignment, and a warrant for her arrest is issued – the same one Milo only accepts once he hears it is Nicole – his ex-wife. Nicole is following leads in a story pointing towards crooked cops stealing drugs from evidence lock-up, and Milo is certainly too one-track minded to get this sooner rather than later.

Now this all seems like it could be a promising premise, but it’s really one big wasted opportunity. Butler and Aniston are both very capable actors, but here they simply fall in with a nonsensical script about dirty cops chasing a lousy couple. Are we supposed to root for the two leads simply because the story says so? The two play off of each other in the form of strange grimaces (when Milo gets the overhand over Nicole) and awkward comebacks (when Nicole gets the overhand over Milo), and the action scenes they participate in are actually pretty terrible, one chase scene in particular standing out as snooze-inducing, even more so than the rest of this movie.

The Bounty Hunter is not even enjoyable if you try to enjoy it, not even if you go in expecting a bad movie, it is just an incoherent mess, about one very corrupt cop and one other setup to look that way by a script that manages to keep your attention in a way that it shouldn’t – by giving you hope that this might get better. But by the halfway mark that hope starts receding to the back of your mind, and by the time there is about 30 minutes of the movie left you hope for it to just end, which makes it into a very long 30 minutes indeed. The Bounty Hunter is just stupid, and the stupidity reaches its pinnacle in Milo’s last act in the movie to get close to Nicole – I won’t tell you, but you’ll wish I had…