The Ugly Truth

Abby (Heigl) is a very talented and attractive show producer, but can't seem to find Mr Right. Mike (Butler) joins her morning show's team as a seduction expert. He gets on Abby's nerves for being too cynical. Colin (Winter) is a surgeon Abby has her eyes on. After a bet involving a resignation, Mike agrees to help Abby seduce Colin.

As is usually the case with romantic comedies, the plot remains very simple to leave room for the characters. But The Ugly Truth plays with the genre in quite a few ways: the coachee from Hitch becomes a quite attractive and successful person, the whole bet set-up from How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days and its obvious consequences are turned around in this new film.

Ultimately, The Ugly Truth is a comedy based on a romantic story rather than a romantic story with some jokes included. It acknowledges its predecessors and builds on them. As such, it needed as talented actors as Butler and Heigl to pull it off.

But it also grows bigger than all its predecessors: where most romantic comedies were geared towards "awww" moments and thus, arguably, more oriented towards the fairer sex, The Ugly Truth will satisfy most guys, if only through Mike's cynical one-liners. This is possibly the biggest success of the film: it gets both sexes together for a very fun hour and a half.

Pierre Schramm

A chick flick. Which is good. And that will allow you to understand why people eat their hot dogs differently in IKEA. Seriously, that's all you should need to know to go to this film. But for all you punters out there waiting for more review-tastic goodness, here comes: Abby (Heigl) is a very talented and attractive show producer, but can't seem to find Mr Right. Mike (Butler) joins her morning show's team as a seduction expert. He gets on Abby's nerves for being too cynical. Colin (Winter) is a surgeon Abby has her eyes on. After a bet involving a resignation, Mike will help Abby seduce Colin.

As is usually the case with romantic comedies, the plot remains very simple to leave room for the characters. But The Ugly Truth plays with the genre in quite a few ways: the coachee from Hitch becomes a quite attractive and successful person, the whole bet set-up from How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days and its obvious consequences are turned around in this new film.

Ultimately, The Ugly Truth is a comedy based on a romantic story rather than a romantic story with some jokes included. It acknowledges its predecessors and builds on them. As such, it needed as talented actors as Butler and Heigl to pull it off.

But it also grows bigger than all its predecessors: where most romantic comedies were geared towards "awww" moments and thus more oriented towards the fairer sex, The Ugly Truth will satisfy most guys, if only through Mike's cynical one-liners.

This is possibly the biggest success of the film: it gets both sexes together for a very fun hour and a half.

Pierre Schramm