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In deference to my opponents, who I hold in high esteem because they are part of my own mind, and I really respect me, I grant that, yes, there is a lot of swearing in The Ugly Truth, and the frankness of its language would be bracing if the rest of the film was similarly challenging. Think of Knocked Up, one of only a handful of good films to feature Katherine Heigl (Under Siege 2 being the other), which used coarse language but also used its style and form to question the very nature of what a romantic comedy could be. In that instance, the form dictated the direction that the script took, so the use of harsh language felt natural to the story.

In The Ugly Truth, however, the story and general style of the film is about as straightforward as a romantic comedy can get. Heigl is a high strung career woman who is unlucky in love. Butler is the boorish new colleague who she initially hates, then comes to admire when he helps her get her perfect man, then they fall for each other and I don’t even need to finish that plot synopsis. If you don’t know how the film ends, then you either have never seen a romantic comedy before, or you have, but you also have the form of amnesia that Guy Pearce has in Memento, but every time you watch a formulaic romcom, it’s like you are watching it for the first time. What a blissful and charmed life you must lead.

Anyway, the film follows all the familiar beats, but instead of witty repartee or sexual chemistry, it awkwardly crams in arbitrary swear words and discussion of sex to no notable effect. Actually, that’s a slight lie: the scene in which Heigl accidentally goes to an important business meeting wearing vibrating underwear which is being controlled by an impish young child nearby is notable for trying to derive comedy from what is essentially sexual assault and failing quite spectacularly.

The whole enterprise just feels off and off-putting. No one wants to see a frothy romantic comedy featuring a load of swear words and endless discussions of masturbation any more than they want to see a movie about the Holocaust starring Jerry Lewis. Yet somehow we live in a world in which The Ugly Truth and The Day The Clown Cried both exist, though at least Jerry Lewis had the good sense to hide his monstrosity from the rest of the world.

Curse you, nuance!

There is a special relationship between Gerard Butler and Things I Learned From Movie X which I shall relate to you now, since failing to do so after mentioning it would just seem weird. When I started writing this series nearly two years ago, the inaugural column was on Law Abiding Citizen, a violent and really dumb action film in which Butler sets out to kill all the people involved with a miscarriage of justice, including people whose only relation to the original crime seemingly was that they knew that the concept of injustice existed. Shortly afterwards, I wrote about The Bounty Hunter, a film which somehow made the previously noble endeavour of hunting people for money seem tawdry and venal. I had hoped that The Ugly Truth could form the final part of my Gerard Butler triptych, which would be my own Three Colors Trilogy, except it would be one color, and that color would be the color of a grey autumn morning, soaked in bitter tears. Or magenta, I haven’t decided yet.

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