Marshall and the Movies

Have you ever watched a movie and wondered what could make an actor’s standards drop so low?  Even if you haven’t before, you will watching Gerard Butler and Jennifer Aniston slog through the miserable “The Bounty Hunter.” You may not have held either of these actors in the highest of regards anyways, but it’s easily a career low for both stars.

The movie is an action comedy – well, if you count Butler punching a few people as action and a few pity sneer as comedy.  We’ve never quite seen a plot like this, where exes fight with stakes as high as prison, but it never feels the slightest bit original.  In fact, it just feels like an old trip down Memory Lane, mimicking every sort of used gimmick with ex-lovers.  But boy, Memory Lane has never looked so run-down or shabby.  It’s time for some renovation.

It’s the typical “hate turns to love” romance story as Butler’s bounty hunter Milo gets to track down ex-wife Nicole, Aniston’s flighty news reporter who foolishly misses her court date over an article.  He finds her and begins hauling her to jail, and on their journey, they suddenly start to realize that they never gave their marriage a fair shot.  I’d call it a dumbed-down Stockholm syndrome, but something tells me the writers of this movie don’t even have the intelligence to use Wikipedia and look it up.

Don’t even mention the writers adding insult to injury by trying to add complexity to the plot by adding in other storylines.  Honestly, if anyone wants to spend nearly two hours of their life watching this movie, they want to see it for Butler and Aniston.  The last thing we want is to have our time wasted by anything that detracts from the main story – sorry, Jason Sudeikis, but you really stink here, and Lorne Michaels would fire you if you ever did anything this bad on “SNL.”  D /