It is what it is.
There is a moment near the end of "The Ugly Truth" where Kathryn Heigl's Abby and Gerard Butler's Mike have seemed to fall for each other and are on the verge of a romantic evening, but because of Abby's involvement with another man, he walks away and leaves her alone in the hallway of the hotel they are staying at. In this moment, Director of Photography Russell Carpenter creates a semi-vertigo shot (I say "semi", because the forward tracking motion is intentionally discernible) to underline the distance between the two characters as Mike walks away. It's a nice shot, but it's awkwardly interrupted with a cut to a close-up of Abby's reaction before cutting back to the vertigo shot. I couldn't figure out for the life of me how that cut paid off. Who interjects a run-of-the-mill close-up into the middle of a purposeful vertigo shot and then cuts back to that same vertigo shot? I wanted to yell out loud at the screen, in vein hope that either the director and/or editor would hear my cry. But it would be to no avail.
Thus is the film that is "The Ugly Truth." It takes a very interesting universal truth about the difference between the expectations a man and woman have in a relationship and, rather than offer incite wrapped into a thoughtfully funny narrative, cheapens it. It goes over-the-top in an effort to be funny while several of the supporting characters venture too far from reality to have any credibility.
I like Kathryn Heigl. Her and Gerard Butler are solely responsible for any amount of life brought to this insipid piece of work. There was one scene at a baseball game that I genuinely laughed at. A later sequence, revolving around a pair of vibrating underwear, that is probably hoping to be the laugh-out-loud moment of the movie simply does not achieve what it sets out to because I could see how it all would unfold from the moment it started to. Ultimately, I felt the movie could have done without the whole sequence.
Correction: I could have done without the whole movie.
