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‘That’s a joke, right?’, a colleague asks Luke Wilson’s New York engineer Matt when he makes an off-colour quip that falls flat. It’s a question you’ll ask yourself repeatedly in this painfully unfunny comedy. A cross between ‘Superman’ and ‘The Break-Up’, it charts Matt’s relationship with Jenny (Uma Thurman), a mild mannered librarian by day, caped superhero G-Girl by night. When Matt breaks up with her, G-Girl lets loose her superhuman rage on the poor schmuck, proving that hell knows no fury like a woman of steel spurned.
As ‘The Incredibles’ proved, there are laughs to be had in landing superheroes into humdrum domestic scenarios. But this film wastes Thurman and Wilson’s comic skills with dreadful dialogue, shoddy effects and irritating subplots (is evil mastermind Eddie Izzard’s boyhood crush on G-Girl necessary?). What’s worse, the film’s unease about female power, which sees Thurman humiliated in a girl-fight with Matt’s new squeeze Hannah (the homely Anna Faris), is vaguely distasteful. At one point, jealous Thurman tosses a live shark into Matt and Hannah’s love nest. Unwittingly plunged into this farrago, the shark earns my sympathy.