My Super Ex-Girlfriend

Starring: Uma Thurman, Luke Wilson, Anna Faris

Director: Ivan Reitman

Category: IIA

The focus of My Super Ex-Girlfriend inevitably falls on Uma Thurman. In a refreshing change of tack, eschewing sword-wielding solemnity for camp comedy, she plays Jenny Johnson, a neurotic art gallery manager who moonlights as superhero G-Girl. Turning it up a few notches from her previous attempts at humour - The Producers and Prime - Thurman shows a deft hand that may well see her taking over from Meryl Streep as Hollywood's favourite ditz.

But there's more to Ivan Reitman's reinterpretation of the superhero genre as he debunks the superhero mythology by looking at G-Girl's trials and tribulations when the costume comes off and real-life among mortals kicks in.

Along the way, there are some memorable gags - the likes of G-Girl breaking beds while having sex or putting out towering infernos while on a toilet break during a date. But the key to My Super Ex-Girlfriend is Johnson's paramour, Matt Saunders (played by Luke Wilson), whose attempts to ditch his super-girlfriend trigger rounds of G-driven revenge.

The decision to cast Wilson, one of Hollywood's new Brat Pack, in the role speaks volumes about Reitman's focus. His Ghostbusters revealed a Gotham City drowning in the go-getting excess of the 1980s. My Super Ex-Girlfriend examines the new breed of urban, professional male: feeble, unconfident individuals whose braggadocio is all talk - a type often played up by Wilson, Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn and the like. For all their swagger, they no longer reign supreme over women.

Awareness about the rules of engagement between the sexes (from dithering attempts to articulate their feelings to an understanding of sexual harassment laws in the workplace) has surely put a damper on a generation still brought up with patriarchical expectations.

My Super Ex-Girlfriend is quite old-fashioned in its underlying tone. A failure in love, Saunders suppresses his feelings for a colleague, Hannah (Anna Faris), out of a sense of inferiority (Hannah goes out with a model) and a genuine inability to say what he feels. True love is what he desires - and love also fires the feud between G-Girl and her nemesis Bedlam (a surprisingly restrained performance from Eddie Izzard). The latter's attempts to neutralise her powers stem from matters of the heart rather than a desire for the world's gold and oil deposits.

All of which results in a climax that wouldn't look amiss in a typical romantic comedy. The decision to boil down the anarchy to such conventional messages takes the superhero punch out of My Super Ex-Girlfriend.

My Super Ex-Girlfriend is screening now