Jennifer Aniston & Gerard Butler in the movie The Bounty Hunter

Remember "Bird on a Wire" with Goldie Hawn and Mel Gibson? How about "I Love Trouble" with Julia Roberts and Nick Nolte?

Try pulling concrete details of those rom-coms from the windmills of your mind; it's like a party game played by amnesiacs.

I mean, do the people who made those movies remember them? And yet they're better than director Andy Tennant's "The Bounty Hunter."

Jennifer Aniston stars as a New York Daily News reporter on the trail of a police corruption scandal.

She jumps bail -- right, forgot to tell you that, she skips a court hearing to meet up with a snitch who has information about a faked suicide -- and her ex-husband, who's an ex-cop, is now a bounty hunter played by Gerard Butler and he's thrilled to be the one bringing her in. Who wouldn't want to stuff his ex-wife into a car trunk, right? Right?

But he owes some loan sharks a few grand, so once they get to Atlantic City everyone's trying to kill them, and they bicker and bicker and chase and chase and are chased and chased again. We have to take the sexual tension on faith, as with everything in this formulaic glob of a script by Sarah Thorp.

At one point the reporter's smarmy co-worker, played by longtime "Saturday Night Live" ensemble player Jason Sudeikis, gets strapped to a chair and has his bones broken in a golf-club-whacking. All right. (A) Sudeikis is eerily unamusing throughout; if you didn't know him from "SNL" you'd swear he'd never done comedy before in his life. And he gets no help from what's on the page. And (B), that scene is, like, huh? Wha? I'm all for "edge" and "grit" in my globular action-romantic-comedies, but this genre has devolved to the point where what I appreciate most, in the end, is simply not cringing.

Also it would be nice to not hate the male lead.

While he certainly has presence and a good voice, there's something about Butler in these sorts of jolly-tormentor roles that makes me think "soccer hooligan." As for Aniston, her script karma continues its vengeful post-"Friends" rampage. Here she is mainly confined to a one-note snit, and to modeling the way her behind looks from behind, in tight skirts.

Who's behind the camera, the Sudeikis character?

"She may be a strong, independent woman on the outside," says the reporter's mother, played by Christine Baranski with as much conviction as Baranski's sense of humor allows. "But inside she's just a girl who wants to be loved by her man."

There's an enormous qualitative difference between a movie containing a line like that, a line roughly that cliched, and one that stoops to include that specific line.

 

Milo Boyd (Gerard Butler), a down-on-his-luck bounty hunter, gets his dream job when he is assigned to track down his bail-jumping ex-wife, reporter Nicole Hurly (Jennifer Aniston). He thinks all thats ahead is an easy payday, but when Nicole gives him the slip so she can chase a lead on a murder cover-up, Milo realizes that nothing ever goes simply with him and Nicole. The exes continually one-up each other until they find themselves on the run for their lives. They thought their promise to love, honor and obey was tough staying alive is going to be a whole lot tougher. Andy Tennant (Hitch, Sweet Home Alabama) directs.

 

MPAA rating: PG-13 (for sexual content including suggestive comments, language, and some violence).

Running time: 1:51.

Cast: Jennifer Aniston (Nicole Hurley); Gerard Butler (Milo Boyd); Christine Baranski (Kitty Hurley); Jason Sudeikis (Stewart); Jeff Garlin (Sid); Cathy Moriarty (Irene).

Credits: Directed by Andy Tennant; written by Sarah Thorp; produced by Neal H. Moritz. A Columbia Pictures release.

The Bounty Hunter Movie Review - Jennifer Aniston & Gerard Butler