by David Roark

Takes its rightful place as the All About Steve of 2010.

“She may be a strong, independent woman on the outside, but inside she’s just a girl who wants to be loved by her man.”

“That’s for shooting at my wife.”

“Baby, I’ll be back.”

With sincere lines like this and a whopping runtime of 110 minutes (a little long for brainless shenanigans), the newest Hollywood rom-com disaster, The Bounty Hunter, may have you sighing and snoring before the opening credits conclude.

Directed by Andy Tennant, the filmmaker behind Sweet Home Alabama and the much better Hitch, this action-adventure-romantic comedy-road movie covers quite a few genres yet completely fails to entertain. The only tolerable thing about it is Gerard Butler, but even his typecast character is beginning to lose its hunky Scottish charm.

Butler plays Milo Boyd, a former cop turned bounty hunter. Down on his luck and desperate for cash, Milo gets the job of a lifetime when his boss, Sid (Jeff Garlin), offers him $5,000 to track down his ex-wife Nicole Hurly (Jennifer Aniston), an ambitious New York Daily News investigative reporter, for assaulting an officer and failing to appear in court. Beyond bitter about the divorce, he accepts the assignment with much rejoicing.

Needless to say, catching and keeping Nicole locked down turns out to be no easy task for Milo, especially considering several meandering subplots: A tattooed criminal (Peter Greene) is trying to murder Nicole because she has secret information about an alleged suicide. A couple of dimwitted thugs, hired by a ruthless bookie named Irene (Cathy Moriarty), are after Milo for a hefty gambling debt. And Nicole's dorky coworker, Stewart (Jason Sudeikis), who is pathetically smitten over her, is thrown into the jumble.

It may sound exhilarating, but it's not. Tennant and his writer, Sarah Thorp, should have mastered one story before intertwining a thousand others. It's simply a mess — and a boring one at that. Despite all the attempted suspense and commotion, the way the plot resolves itself is rather humdrum. The problem isn't the predictability, however — it's the fact that Milo and Nicole's romance isn't even slightly convincing.

In a sappy dinner scene, in which they “surprisingly” end up at their honeymoon bed and breakfast, it becomes conceivable that the couple might have dated a few times in the past, but marriage? There's no way. Thorp's biggest attempt to sell the love, though, is through constant, excessive bickering between the two, portraying them in the way that every American husband and wife, supposedly, behaves. But that doesn't work, either. It gets progressively more annoying and fabricated.

Speaking of artificial, The Bounty Hunter's most prominent element is, perhaps, Jennifer Aniston's body. Typical of modern Hollywood cinema, her character has an uncanny gift for finding precisely the right positions to show off her cleavage and skinny legs. Not only that, Nicole is wearing a mini skirt the entire movie. This sexy factor might have worked, but with Aniston's overly tanned, now 41-year-old figure and a lack of context, it simply reeks of cheap advertisement.

Aniston's performance doesn't help her case. Though proven to be more than eye candy with her work on Friends and roles in The Good Girl and Friends With Money, as Nicole Hurly she takes on the oh-so-popular Megan Fox mold — all looks, no skills. That said, in comparison to the other cast members (aside from Gerard Butler), she executes like Meryl Streep. Jason Sudeikis, who has previously appeared on Saturday Night Live and 30 Rock, is agonizingly bad as Stewart, the nerdy journalist. The film’s kitsch acting is just another example of its awfulness.

Taking its rightful place as the All About Steve of 2010 (look for it in next year’s Razzies), The Bounty Hunter has absolutely nothing to offer: It isn’t funny, sexy, sweet, or thrilling — everything it pitifully attempts to be. Its lowbrow script and terrible performances are a humiliation to cinema and an injustice to humanity. Which inevitably raises the question: Why was it ever made?

David Roark loves movies. And likes to write about them.