In The Bounty Hunter, Jennifer Aniston and Gerard Butler work on the borders of their comfort zones. Butler is the titular character, a former cop so down on his luck he takes a gig tracking down his ex-wife (and alleged real-life girlfriend) Aniston, for a payday of $5,000.
“I felt this was a different role for her,” says Butler of his co-star. “She is the Queen of Comedy and done a lot of romantic comedies, but this doesn’t feel like a romantic comedy. It feels like an action driven comedy. She was playing a much bitchier, hard edged character than I think anyone has ever seen her do before and for me that is exciting.”
Aniston, best known as Rachel from Friends, or Brad Pitt’s ex wife, depending on your appetite for the tabloids, says she was attracted to the role because “it wasn’t your traditional run of the mill girl meets guy, guy meets girl.”
“It is an action comedy and a road movie with a little romance in there and a little suspense,” she said recently in a sit-down with Metro in New York City.
She was, however, taken by surprise by the physical demands of the production. Doing stunts in four inch heels isn’t as easy as it looks.
“Your adrenaline is going and you’re not really feeling it at the moment and then I’d get home and notice a bruise here and a callous here,” said Aniston, who adds she would consider other action roles in future. “Then there were the handcuffs. Try wearing those, attached to a car door for three days. Not fun.”
For Butler, a Scottish heartthrob best known for his sculpted abs and roles in violent films like 300, the challenge wasn’t the physical side, but breaking the action star stereotype.
“My break in America was Attila the Hun, which went into Time Line, Tomb Raider, Reign of Fire and at that point I loved doing that, but it’s not like when you are still making your way in the business that people go, ‘Tomb Raider, Oh my God, the guy should be in a comedy.’ I was waiting for the right opportunity. I thought I don’t want to dive in with something crappy. I wanted to wait until I’m lucky enough to get the right script that felt right.”
Wanderlust is something we haven’t seen for a while — a Jennifer Aniston movie that doesn’t stink. In fact, it’s really good. It has a great supporting cast, loads of laughs and a wild hallucination scene. The only thing that stinks in this flick is the hippie hygiene.
Aniston and Paul Rudd play George and Linda, a big-city couple forced to downsize when he loses his job and her documentary is rejected by HBO. Forced to sell their apartment and faced with the prospect of working with his idiot brother, the pair move into Elysium, a free love commune where “dreams are dispensed daily, just bring your own container,” and adopt a hippie lifestyle.
This is the funniest movie to hit theatres since “Bridesmaids” last year.
Aniston reminds us of why she is such a big star in this movie. Rudd is also charming and does a mirror pep talk scene that is raunchy, funny and kind of surreal. Speaking of surreal, the hallucination sequence is trippy and hilarious. I’ve seen loads of drug scenes in movies but this one made me feel high with laughter.
Aside from the funny script, the reason why this movie works is that each of the supporting characters could have been the focus of the story and it still would have been a good film. There isn’t a character here that feels extraneous. Justin Theroux as head hippie Seth has some of the movie’s best lines and it’s a treat to see Alan Alda on the big screen again.
I also loved the über hippie jokes. Where else would you find a placenta as soup stock joke?
The famous War on Drugs seems to have been lost… at the movies at least.
These days drugs—some legal, some not; some real, some not—are popular plot devices in Hollywood. Recently Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy battled against a nasty drug pusher in The Heat, the drug lord Braga made a return appearance in Fast & Furious 6 and Love and Other Drugs, starring Jake Gylennhaal as a pharmaceutical salesman played like a 90-minute ad for Viagra.
In this weekend’s comedy We’re the Millers Jason Sudeikis and Jennifer Aniston star in the story of a pot dealer who recruits a fake family to help him smuggle enough marijuana to “kill Willie bleeping Nelson” out of Mexico. “Crossing the border alone, huge red flag,” says David (Sudeikis), “but families, they don’t get a second look.”
Jay Baruchel played one of the most unconventional drug dealers of recent times in Fetching Cody.
Variety called the movie a “mix of gritty street-life drama, perky teen romance and seriocomic sci-fi time-tripping,” but that description hardly does this strange little gem justice. Baruchel is Art, a drug pusher on Vancouver’s Downtown East side. When his girlfriend Cody (Sarah Lind) drops into a coma after a drug overdose, Art uses a homemade time machine to visit key moments in Cody’s life. Ultimately he learns that the best way to save her life will be the hardest option for him to choose. It’s a cool film for those who like their romantic fantasy with a bit of grit.
David Cronenberg devised Ephemerol, a tranquilizer used as a morning sickness remedy for his film Scanners. Side effects? Telekinetic and telepathic abilities. Later, in Naked Lunch, Cronenberg featured the more recreational drug Bug Powder, a yellow dust formally used by exterminators, informally by people looking to find a “literary high.”
A Clockwork Orange was chock-a-block with fake drugs; everything from Drencrom to the synthetic mescaline Synthemesc to Vellocet, which produced ultra-violent tendencies and sudden outbursts of Singing in the Rain.
Brain Candy, the 1996 Kids in the Hall comedy, created a cure for depression called GLeeMONEX that “makes you feel like it’s 72°F in your head all the time.” Unfortunately the pill’s patients also turn into comatose zombies.
Perhaps the strangest recreational cinematic drug was Space Coke from Cheech and Chong’s Next Movie. One snort was enough to literally send both stoned comedians into outer space.
Is there a film title this year riper with pathos than The Break-Up? It seems like just yesterday that Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt were announcing that their Hollywood romance was on the rocks, generating screaming headlines in the tabloids. Now those headlines have been paraphrased into a movie title, released just a week after Aniston’s former flame has a child with his scarlet woman, Angelina Jolie. It’s almost as if the great publicist in the sky said, “OK, I’ll cut you a break here. Your last two movies have flopped so here is an ironic title and a serendipitous birth to stir up some hype. Good luck.”
The Break-Up is being marketed as a romantic comedy, but really it is more a battle of the sexes—make that exes—with more in common with The War of the Roses, a nasty divorce movie from a decade ago, than a traditional romantic comedy. Imagine if Ingmar Bergman had directed When Harry Met Sally.
The romance part of the film is dismissed early on with a montage of pictures of the couple in their salad days, holding hands, kissing, on vacation. The viewer gets the idea that they were once a happy pair, but fifteen minutes into the film after a screaming match following a disastrous dinner party their union is shattered. Brooke (Aniston) still loves Gary (Vaughn) but wants him to learn to respect her. He’s a man-child who doesn’t get it and their relationship frays into a he said/she said battle in which ownership of their beautiful condo becomes the main issue.
The movie has an odd tone, at once playing on the strengths of its stars—Vaughn is once again the fast-talking charmer, Aniston the pretty, girl-next-door type—while also playing them against type. Vaughn crosses the line from charmer to homophobic jerk, a guy so obnoxious the audience is actually happy during a scene in which he gets beaten up. Aniston effortlessly handles the comedic portion of her role and is quite good in the dramatic bits, but I’m not sure that given her recent real-life romantic history that audiences want to see Rachel… rather Aniston break down into tears over a man.
There are laughs here, particularly in the scenes between Vaughn and his Swingers’ co-star Jon Favreau, but they are generally followed by long stretches of uncomfortable tension. Because we see so little of the couple in the honeymoon phase of the relationship, when things go sour we don’t really care. It’s like watching strangers argue in a restaurant. You may be compelled to look in that train wreck kind of way, but ultimately it is unaffecting.
This is a perfect date movie if you plan on dumping the person you’re with when the movie is over.
During the screening of “The Bounty Hunter,” a new romantic comedy from Jennifer Aniston and Gerard Butler, I had a feeling I have never experienced before. I found myself wishing be-mulleted reality star Duane ‘Dog’ Chapman would make a cameo appearance and bring some much needed entertainment value to this movie. Not that I’m much of a fan of the A&E bounty hunter show, but his puka shell necklaces and flamboyant hairstyle might have spiced this lame action comedy up.
The premise is simple. Butler is the titular character, a former cop so down on his luck he takes a gig tracking down his ex-wife (and alleged real-life girlfriend) Aniston, for a payday of five thousand dollars. She’s an ambitious newspaper reporter who will let nothing get in the way of getting a story—including a court date. When she skips court to follow a lead a warrant is issued for her arrest. Enter Butler. He finds her easily, but a funny thing happens on the way back to jail—the pair begins to appreciate one another again. Imagine a humdrum sitcom version of “Duplicity” or “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” and you get the idea.
“The Bounty Hunter” doesn’t really know what it wants to be. Is it a romantic comedy? Sort of. Is it an action picture? Kinda. Is it a road movie? Hmmmm, maybe. In fact it’s all those things and less. This truly is a case of the whole being lesser than the sum of its parts.
Aniston and Butler play classic screwball comedy characters, gamely indulging in fast paced repartee and some light farce, but it all feels very “been there, done that.” How many more times can the line “You’re crazy!” be answered with “Maybe I am?” before it takes top dishonors as the Movie Cliché of the Year? The script is on autopilot and even the usually charming Aniston and Butler can’t make these characters interesting. It’s scene after scene of endless (and often unfunny) bickering, very tepid action and screwball situations that seem like we’ve seen them before.
There is the odd bright spot. Christine Baranski sparkles as Aniston’s mom, a be-dazzled Atlantic City lounge singer and raises the movie’s temperature from frigid to temperate when she’s on screen and a dinner scene at a honeymoon hotel has some heat to it, but it comes too late in the movie to make much difference.
“The Bounty Hunter” is an almost instantly forgettable film, one that relies on the appeal of Aniston’s short skirts and Butler’s abs more than a decent script or interesting story.
In The Bounty Hunter, Jennifer Aniston and Gerard Butler work on the borders of their comfort zones. Butler is the titular character, a former cop so down on his luck he takes a gig tracking down his ex-wife (and alleged real-life girlfriend) Aniston, for a payday of $5,000.
