The Bounty Hunter

I went and saw The Bounty Hunter the other night(Mostly for this blog, partly for Jennifer Aniston, and partly out of boredom). Aniston plays leading lady, Nicole Hurley, a reporter for the Daily News. Gerard Butler stars opposite her as, Milo Boyd, her ex-husband and ex-cop turned bounty hunter. The movie uses a nonlinear narrative structure, like Memento or (500) Days of Summer, and shows Hurley escaping from Boyd's trunk only to be tackled several yards away, then cuts to a different scene telling the audience it's 48 hours earlier. This allows for the viewer to know where the story is going and quickly addresses scenes in the trailer which the audience is surely expecting. Let me just say that this is one of the only clever things that was done on this movie and it needed a lot more than this to save it.

The promo poster boasts the obvious draw of the movie with Butler and Aniston being handcuffed to each other (I don't think they ever were in the movie). It also reads from the director of Hitch, Andy Tennant, who manipulated the roles played by Eva Mendes and Will Smith, into a romantic comedy that five years down the road is as watchable as any movie that reruns that often on cable television. But, where Hitch was great, the Bounty Hunter was mired in mediocrity. Hitch had a pretty solid supporting cast, good writing, a decent amount of predictability, and Will Smith, of course. The Bounty Hunter didn't have a "Kevin James" to carry the film when the two stars weren't on screen. There wasn't anything memorable from the dialouge and Butler hasn't reached the level that few actors in Hollywood like Smith have. Also, his accent felt forced, not that he couldn't do it well, but knowing he's a Scottish actor I had a tough time accepting the role he was portraying.

The small role put in by, Christine Baranski, as Kitty Hurley, Aniston's mother in the film, was the only memorable supporting role. Her phone conversation with her fictional daughter is one of the funniest moments of the movie.

This will be a movie that a lot of couples go to see and I really pity all the men who are dragged to this by their girlfriends. But, it could be an opportunity for you to give her one and get one later, and in that case see Green Zone or Shutter Island sometime down the road.