The Bounty Hunter, a movie that sparked a million “Gerard Butler and Jennifer Aniston Sitting in a Tree!” tabloid covers now has a trailer. It debuted on Yahoo! Movies and wants desperately to be noticed among Iron Man 2, Alice in Wonderland and Clash of the Titans. So let’s notice it!
I have to say this for The Bounty Hunter — it’s not The Ugly Truth. Hunter has guns! Guns that are being fired at people! Such glimpses of semi-automatic bliss are a promise of action beyond “Oh my GOD, I can’t believe I ever married YOU” histrionics. The fact that people are waving guns and crashing cars hints that once upon a time, this may have been a script where the heroine had actually committed a crime (a “cool” crime like stealing cars or robbing banks), skipped bail, and crossed paths with a bounty hunter. Love ensued between two sleazy characters. But then rewrites happened, the characters went from the underworld to the suburb, and the heroine became a good girl accused of something bad. Yawn.
But Butler (shirtless!) really does charm his way through every frame. I know you’ll put that down to my girlish bias, but it’s true! He’s got that roguish, Mel Gibson-circa-1987 appeal that begs for a better film and a funnier costar. The game is automatically dragged down by Aniston, who is playing her usual strung out romantic comedy character. But this one is a hard-hitting journalist of some kind, so it’s automatically more feminist than the other 159 versions, even if she’s dressed in an outfit Lara Croft would call impractical. (Have you ever seen costumes less suited to a bounty hunter and a journalist? Could they not have given him a t-shirt and leather jacket for the sake of sexy?)