Release Date: July 24, 2009

(out of 4)

If a famous Hollywood actress is stuck with a miserably coarse script she can always smile more and stick out her boobs. Someone evidently must have told our star that by the time they were filming the third act. Katherine Heigl is playing another one of those characters who is a hard-driven and hectic career woman but has a bankrupt love life in "The Ugly Truth." Here she plays a morning TV talk show producer named Abby who seems to have lots of clichéd ideas on how to get ratings. Yet in an early scene while out on a first date, she is a deranged batty in controlling the course of the date even going so far as to hand over to the guy a printed list of conversational subjects.

She’s a loser in love (see Heigl in “27 Dresses” too). But wait a minute? No young career woman her age would ever act that way on a date, going out of the way to un-order a bottle of water that the guy has asked the waiter for. Come on, how could any woman be career savvy as to made it this far into the TV biz and yet have no idea how to act socially accustomed on a date? Her character, in contrived stages of plotting, gets a mentor to help her land a man.

The movie knows nothing about how real television professionals behave in the studio environment. Everybody around the studio talks about sex or slings one-liner jokes about sex on a constant basis. It would seem like none of these professionals have anything else on their minds whatsoever, and as it stands, pervasive behavior comes off vapid and soulless. With such non-stop anatomical mindsets, the first and second, and let’s not forget third or fourth, crotch jokes fizzle instantaneously because none of them feels spontaneous. The raunch is pitifully forced.

It’s not Abby’s idea when bad boy Mike Chadaway (Gerard Butler, “300”) is hired to boost ratings as a new special correspondent with a segment named after the film’s title whose first advice for women is to shut up and be passive. Abby at first hates this guy but soon enough is shopping with him so he can help her pick out a sexier bra and cocktail dress so she can impress the surgeon hunk next door named Colin (Eric Winter). At the same time, Mike is trying to teach her to play hard to get. Before you know it, Abby is out on a date with Colin trying to clean a stain from his pants, but to on-lookers looks awfully like a pantomimed… you know what, forget it.

“The Ugly Truth” is a pandering romantic comedy that wants to be so hip and edgy that it hopes to appeal to smutty males as much as it does to progressive females who… gee, like sex as much as men do. Mike, coming off like a soused Las Vegas hotel comedian, pitches a few persuasive barbs on why men flee from tight-lipped and inhibited women. But his profanity would only realistically make him a hit with barmaids, not successful women who wear business suits.

For those of you out there who have seen enough movies to predict what happens next, guess which two characters fall in love? One could talk about the pseudo-dynamite twists and turns, but let’s jump ahead and bring you some closure. It would be nice to say that the movie has its share of highs and lows, but please be correctly informed that most of the movie is sedated with lows. What is incredulous about “The Ugly Truth” and now the romantic comedy genre in general, is how un-romantic the romantic comedy has become in our times. Recently “The Proposal” with Sandra Bullock was a rare good breezy one (it even had this old-fashioned thing going for it called wit), but the romantic comedy is routinely the most sour entertainment you could possibly find anywhere and it is a toxin being served up almost regularly these days.