Starring: Katherine Heigl, Gerard Butler, Bree Turner, Eric Winter Director: Robert Luketic Category: IIB
In a 2007 Vanity Fair interview, Katherine Heigl described Knocked Up - the Judd Apatow comedy she starred in - as a film which 'paints women as shrews, as humourless and uptight'.
Two years on, Heigl is the lead in The Ugly Truth, a film in which she plays - what else? - a humourless, uptight shrew who, in order to hook up with the man of her dreams, jettisons her principles, takes advice from a chauvinist colleague, and subjects herself to all kinds of humiliation.
Robert Luketic's film is so unrepentant in milking misogyny for laughs that it makes Knocked Up look like a revolutionary gender-studies thesis.
Never mind the visual gags, such as how the high-flying television executive Abby Richter (Heigl) is led to eat hot dogs and put on vibrating underwear; just look at the story's driving premise, in which the erstwhile principled Abby agrees to let Mike Chadway (Gerard Butler, right with Heigl) spew his bigoted bile on her daily news programme if Mike - who proclaims that the road to happiness for single women lies on a Stairmaster - helps her to net a hunky doctor (Eric Winter) living next door.
But it's not just the neanderthal antics that sink The Ugly Truth. It's one thing to mistake the gratuitous use of un-PC acts and lewd language as a sign of edginess, but it's another to employ all that to beef up a story that is utterly formulaic.