Oh Jennifer Aniston, we feel like we’ve had this conversation so many times. What happened to you? You were the golden girl of Hollywood, had the most envied hair of anyone in the world, and even after you and Brad split you were the one we hoped would come out strong. And yet over and over again you produce mediocre (which is a nice word for ‘crap’) romantic comedies with characters that have about as much emotional range as the Andrex puppy. We hoped The Bounty Hunter would be different. It wasn’t.

Catch me if you can

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The Bounty Hunter revolves around two ex-lovers, Milo and Nicole, whose lives collide again under ‘hilarious’ circumstances. When Milo (Gerard Butler) divorced his wife Nicole (our lost love Jen), he thought that was the end of the misery, but all those old emotional wounds are about to be re-opened. Now working as a bounty hunter, Milo is hired to track down his reporter ex-wife, who has jumped bail. The assignment seems simple enough, except that Nicole is on a high profile story – a murder cover-up – and she gives him the slip. When Milo finally catches up with Nicole, the bounty hunter finds himself on the run for his life too as the former lovebirds have to put their many and obvious differences to one side to avoid their pursuers.

No Escape

The problems with this film are varied and fairly standard, from the lack of sexual chemistry between the protagonists, to the cringingly bad script to the over-use of violent slap-stick that makes you long for the gentle days of the Hugh Grant rom-com. Which is a sentence we never thought we’d say. Jennifer spends most of the film in various compromising situations; locked in a car boot, strapped to chairs, hand-cuffed to a bed, a concept which might have been funny had it not being for the horrible, grunting, charisma-less performance from Gerard Butler. His grinning malevolence for his wife makes the film’s “men and women fighting” comedy seem rather tragic, as he lacks any winning charm whatsoever and generally seems like a mysogynistic loser.

Overall this is a meaningless bit of fun, without any of the grace we’ve come to expect from the rom-com genre. If you (for some reason) liked Gerard Butler’s performance in the horrendous The Ugly Truth, then this might be a film for you. For everyone else in the world, steer clear. We’d skip bail too, if watching The Bounty Hunter was our punishment.