The Bounty Hunter

Hollywood’s campaign to convince audiences that beefy Scots bulldog Gerard Butler can play the romantic lead gathers pace with this misjudged marital crime caper. Butler plays Milo Boyd, an ex-cop turned bail bondsman assigned to haul in his ex-wife Nicole (Jennifer Aniston), a hotshot reporter in deep with the law. The pursuit takes this pair of bickering exes from New York to Atlantic City and back, via a series of perfunctory car chases, poorly choreographed punch-ups and excruciating romantic entanglements.

The trouble is not so much that Butler isn’t funny – he isn’t, even slightly – but that he sucks the merest hint of humour from the entire enterprise. Even proven performers like Aniston and Christine Baranski as a sexually voracious mother-in-law are reduced to desperate mugging and hysterical arm-waving in an attempt to fill the comic vacuum which their muscular co-star leaves in his wake. To be fair, the script gives them little to work with: there are maybe three decent laughs, interspersed with long stretches of  interminable, would-be witty banter and one near-unwatchable comedy torture scene.

The score, too, is atrocious: infuriatingly cheeky in the comedy scenes, switching to screeching Bon Jovi-esque AOR whenever things kick off. ‘The Bounty Hunter’ isn’t bad enough to be offensive: it’s simply lazy, trite, smug, irritating and a colossal waste of time, talent and money. There’ll be worse films released in 2010 – but not many.