Things I Learned From Movie X: The Bounty Hunter

By Edwin Davies

August 5, 2010

She's pretending like she doesn't like it, but she totally loves it.

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True love is two people showing absolutely no affection towards each other whatsoever.

At one point in the film, the couple serendipitously (i.e. in an incredibly arbitrary and contrived fashion) wind up staying at the hotel where they spent their honeymoon. One of the owners asks them how they keep the romance alive (As someone whose parents used to run hotels, I can vouch that this a standard, in no way weird and intrusive question.), Butler responds by saying that he never gives cards, flowers or gifts of any kind, and that you'd have to hold a gun to his head to make him say "I love you", which the other owner then says is a sign of true love. And it truly is, because the greatest love stories are the ones in which neither party shows any interest in the other. It goes all the way back to Romeo and Juliet, which famously ends with the starcross'd lovers deciding not to reveal their feelings to each other, moving on and entering into dreary, hateful marriages. It's a tale as old as time.




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Gerard Butler is pure, unfiltered evil. He's the Devil in a checked shirt.

To go back to Midnight Run, one of the things that film did really well was show that whilst DeNiro's character was kind of an awful person who had driven away everyone who ever loved him, it also made him to out to be quite a charming rogue. You liked him. You could imagine sharing a cordial drink with him in a bar right before he slammed your head into the bar and carted you off to jail in handcuffs. The Bounty Hunter goes entirely the opposite way, and has Butler do something so despicable that the audience can never develop any sympathy for him. It's one thing for someone to want to gleefully jump around at the prospect of hunting down his ex-wife for profit; it's kind of a dick move, but people do terrible things when they're hurtin'. And maybe it's okay to break into a stranger's house in pursuit of his quarry; it's part of his job. But deleting unwatched episodes of 30 Rock from someone's TiVo? That's cold.


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