As the quotation goes, “Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.” I have no personal evidence to substantiate the first element, but there is certainly plenty to support the latter, with The Bounty Hunter being just the latest example. This bumbling comic drama (I believe dramedy is the recognized term) desperately wants to be funny. And while sometimes stupid can be funny, sometimes it can also just be stupid.
Gerard Butler has made a couple of attempts now at combining romance and comedy, but so far has yet to convince. He was slightly more successful with The Ugly Truth when paired with Katherine Heigl, but here he and Jennifer Aniston possess little in the way of chemistry. Aniston’s natural comic timing only serves to highlight Butler’s lack of it. But it’s Butler’s edgier, abrasive nature that makes him more ill-suited to the genre.
Here Butler plays Milo Boyd, a one-time cop who now finds himself reduced to chasing down defendants who have skipped bail. When his boss (Jeff Garlin) hands him his latest assignment, he’s euphoric. His ex-wife Nicole (Jennifer Aniston), an ambitious and successful journalist, was charged with assaulting a police officer. When her pursuit of a crucial lead in a story clashes with her court appearance, she chooses to not show up in court with the consequence there is a bounty on her head. Angry with his ex for putting her career ahead of everything, including their marriage, Boyd is happy for the chance to bring Nicole to court.
So begins their turbulent reunion as Nicole investigates a mysterious suicide that makes her the target of the villainous Mahler while Boyd endeavours to get her to court in time to earn his bounty. Inevitably, during the course of their forced proximity the two slowly begin to rekindle their relationship.
Director Andy Tennant, working from a screenplay by Sarah Thorp, seems uncertain of what tone to strike for. Amidst the car chases and shoot outs is slapstick humour in the form of the cartoonish character Stewart (Jason Sudeikis), a nerdy colleague of Nicole who is convinced the two are meant for each other based on one drunken make-out session years before. The reliance on such an absurd and misplaced element only serves to emphasize the film’s inherent lack of genuine wit. Also, the constant and gratuitous display of Aniston’s cleavage smacks of a desperate ploy to distract audiences (the male portion at least) from the film’s many shortcomings, of which the absence of a coherent plot is the most obvious.
Aniston does her best to extricate as many laughs as she can from a script that’s woefully lacking in inspiration. But even with the help of the gifted comic talents of Christine Baranski as Nicole’s mother and the underused Jeff Garlin, The Bounty Hunter provides scant relief from indifference. Comedy is hard and so at times is watching this.
Kevin Murphy
