dir: Ivan Reitman
[img_assist|nid=847|title=So terrible it made me want to cry tears of blood|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=333|height=493]
It is indicative of how much of an optimist (read: lunatic) I really am that I thought this flick could be any good. What the hell was I thinking?
My Super Ex-Girlfriend is crap even compared to other mindless romantic comedies, ignoring the fact that it’s supposed to be a rom-com with the added spice of a superhero storyline. Absolutely woeful. Terrible script, awful performances and an idiotic plot that made me crave one day being deaf and blind so that I never have to see anything like this again.
Just terrible. And goddamn is it tremendously dumb. It could have been marginally entertaining had it just been less aggressively crap, or had any of the lines worked, or had it actually been funny. Some of these actors have done reasonable work in the past, but lumped in together here they bring out the mediocrity in each other so that the film sinks into a fetid swamp of crapulousness.
Matt (Luke Wilson, also known as the dull Wilson brother) is a sad-sack who is unlucky in love. He’s been a dateless wonder for a long time. Not only that, but he has a retarded best friend, Vaughn (Rainn Wilson) who continually showers him with idiotic advice about women as if they were an alien species he’d had no actual contact with thus far. He is also friends with the office bimbo Hannah (the eyebrowless, mannequin-like Anna Farris), and wishes it could be more, but she has a male model boyfriend.
Matt takes a chance and asks out an attractive but demure looking woman on the subway, only to be rebuffed. When someone tries to steal her purse, he clumsily tries to save the day. This warms the cockles of the girl’s heart, and she agrees to date him.
Little does Matt know, but this strange, awkward girl called Jenny (Uma Thurman), is really a superhero called G-Girl, who routinely saves New York from criminals, errant missiles and Godzilla attacks.
At first it’s all powerful sex and Sunday brunches, but after a while, Matt decides that Jenny / G-Girl is too needy and controlling. So he dumps her.
Jenny goes ballistic, and uses her super powers for revenge, going against a century of superhero comic-sourced ethics. She sends his car into orbit. She burns the word ‘DICK’ into his forehead. She ruins his important business meetings. And she throws a shark at him after he hooks up with another woman.
It sounds like it could be entertaining, but the film consistently fails to get the tone right. The performances are generally off across the board, with few scenes really working. When much of the dialogue in scenes occurs, there’s often this almost awkward pause before the next actor speaks, as if they’re surprised by the inanities the other actor just spouted.
They’re not as surprised or dismayed as I was.
They ruin whatever sympathy (however little you could expect to have for such crappy characters in the first place) we might have for either Matt or Jenny by making them excruciatingly annoying. Jenny doesn’t get progressively madder as the flick goes on, she’s just mad from the start because, hey, look at how badly the chicks handle having superpowers. Matt starts off seeming insecure because he’s in a relationship with a super-powered woman, and even jokes about feeling emasculated, only to be seen to be proven ‘right’ when she starts destroying his life.
Of course she’s a nutjob in terms of her threats and acts of vengeance, but then where are our sympathies supposed to lie? They can’t lie with Matt, who just comes across as irritating and pathetic. Not with G-Girl, who abuses her powers because, in the scripts’ eyes, she’s an irrational ‘chick’, and, hey, wouldn’t all the chicks act like that if they were supercharged? Huh? Huh? High-five?
The fact that the script has a fratboy attitude towards women might have been a factor calculated to, um, entice fratboys to the cinema in their droves, but for those of us who aren’t at that evolutionarily-backward stage of development, something like this seems like the remnant of a bygone era, where the bitches knew their place, and sexual harassment was considered a part of the job requirement.
Speaking of which, there is a subtext in the film aimed at, of all things, the evilness of sexual harassment legislation in the workplace. Two scenes where an over-eager supervisor accuses Matt of sexual harassment for doing nothing are meant to, I guess, be funny, but really what they underline is the vaguely misogynist theme permeating the flick. And also, it underlines just how desperate for laughs these incompetent scriptwriters were, because it’s never close to funny.
Director Ivan Reitman has made some entertaining films in the past, like Ghostbusters and Stripes. He has also made a lot of crap. This flick sits firmly on the crap side of the ledger, because it’s easily one of the dumbest and least enjoyable flicks I’ve seen this year.
And I say that as someone who sat through films like Alone in the Dark, Bloodrayne and Casanova in 2006. Read this and know my pain.
0 out of 10
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“Get away from my boyfriend you bitch” – this is the snappiest the script gets, My Super Ex-Girlfriend.
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