'The Ugly Truth' is not a pretty picture

Movie review

The new romantic comedy "The Ugly Truth" takes place in a mysterious fantasy world, a fact made obvious when our heroine Abby (Katherine Heigl) decides to call up her new neighbor for a date. Said neighbor (Eric Winter) is a handsome doctor who looks good in a towel and soulfully admits to being "a cat person." But that's not the fantasy; the real eyebrow-raiser is when Abby calls Dr. Hottie at work and simply asks to speak to him, not giving her name or her insurance number or any statistics involving blood or broken bones, and she gets put right through, no questions asked — he's on the phone in about three seconds. Now, really.

I dwell on this because there's not much else of interest in "The Ugly Truth," a blandly raunchy star vehicle that does its stars few favors. Heigl looks terrific but has a strangely brittle, off-putting quality as Abby, a control-freak television producer who has rotten luck with men. Gerard "The Phantom of the Opera" Butler is Mike, an outspoken TV personality who hosts a grating segment on Abby's morning show called "The Ugly Truth," about male/female relationships. Among his words of advice for women: Grow your hair long, wear tight jeans, and realize that men are incapable of growth, change or progress.

Abby is attractively outraged by all of this, and complains bitterly to her co-worker Joy. (Joy, by the way, is charmingly played by Bree Turner in what I'm going to call the Judy Greer Role — the perky screwballish best pal who's actually way more adorable than the leading lady. This is complicated by the fact that Turner looks a lot like Greer, so much so that I happily wrote, "Oh, it's Judy Greer!" in my notes. But I digress. Again.) Various workplace complications ensue, and Mike becomes a sort of dating coach for Abby, and Abby's cat gets a lot of winsome close-ups, which are among the movie's better moments.

You can, of course, guess where all of this is going, and that's not necessarily a bad thing; romantic comedies generally follow a formula and can sometimes work magic within it. But not this time; director Robert Luketic finds little chemistry between the two leads, and the movie awkwardly seesaws between raunch and romance, as if not sure of its audience. (The screenwriters, in between the blow-job jokes, contrive to make Mike secretly cuddly — by giving him, for example, a cute nephew at home. It works: During a scene when Butler nicely conveys romantic disappointment, a woman in the audience actually whimpered.)

TV morning shows (the sort where the anchor says chirpily before commercial, "Guess who's in rehab this week?") are potentially funny, and John Michael Higgins and Cheryl Hines get a few laughs as the feuding husband-and-wife anchor team. But the movie seems to forget about them too quickly, in favor of showing us Heigl in vibrating underwear. (Think of the "When Harry Met Sally" deli scene, and multiply it by, well, too much.) Whether Abby will end up with manly Mike or Dr. Pretty-Eyes becomes a matter of remarkably little interest; the ugly truth is, it's not particularly funny either.

Moira Macdonald: 206-464-2725 or mmacdonald@seattletimes.com