The Ugly Truth: Critic Reviews

The Ugly Truth isn't fizzy and fun -- it's vacuously snappy.

A cynical, clumsy, aptly titled attempt to cross the female-oriented romantic comedy with the male-oriented gross-out comedy.

There is, in fact, a spark of chemistry between Heigl and Butler: it's testimony to the ineptitude that the film itself acts as such a wet blanket.

The film is so predictable that it might as well have been written as a test classroom exercise in RomCom 101.

Under the direction of Robert Luketic, The Ugly Truth is pleasingly glossy, refreshingly snarky and startlingly sexy.

The people responsible for The Ugly Truth were also responsible for Legally Blonde. That must have been a once-in-a-lifetime thing since this new movie is only half as entertaining as the other one.

Ugly is, indeed, the word for any comedy that manages to insult both its cast and audience with nearly every scene.

The Ugly Truth wants to have it both ways, reveling in a misogyny it claims to deplore.

The ugly truth about The Ugly Truth is the fact that -- funny though it is -- it could have been a whole lot funnier.

The truth is this movie is ugly, in spirit and execution.

With its set 'em up, knock 'em down series of cliches, The Ugly Truth marks off the romantic comedy checklist.

If you like things that are predictable, I can predict you'll love "The Ugly Truth," a new romantic comedy starring Katherine Heigl and Gerard Butler. I sincerely doubt anyone else will respond to its labored scenes and smutty, tittering, unfunny jokes.

Katherine Heigl and Gerard Butler are so pleasant in The Ugly Truth that it's a shame to spoil their party. But toil and try as they do, the comedy bogs down in relentless predictability and the puzzling overuse of naughty words.

Aside from being relational science-fiction, The Ugly Truth feels about 150 years out of date -- or it would, if the script weren't so clinically dependent on the topics of masturbation and genitalia and raunch.

Here's hoping that this unfunny comedy doesn't set both sexes back by 50 years.

Despite the fact that it swims in a veritable ocean of romantic comedy cliches, The Ugly Truth should manage to captivate and charm men and women alike.

The Ugly Truth? That's half right.

It's an odd, far-fetched twist on the Pygmalion story, with the modern angle of poking holes in political correctness, one that might have been made marginally convincing by a dollop of backstory or psychology.

Romantic comedies are an increasingly debased genre, but few recent Hollywood products have been anywhere near as crass and contrived as The Ugly Truth.

Butler has a funny way with a line and a natural comic virility, something Heigl's previous leads lacked. But they don't click as a couple, perhaps because they're kept apart by a wordy script overloaded with blue banter.

Opposites attract, but you'll really wish they hadn't by the time The Ugly Truth is through.

Contrived as a crossover between a female-friendly romantic comedy and a male-targeted, anti-political correctness jab, The Ugly Truth veers between crude and cloying.

Until that final, inevitable kiss, we have to listen to them, and the clatter of their crude, brainless exchanges is unbearable.

Hollywood, it seems, has lost the knack of how to make a good romantic comedy.

Hit-and-miss comedy delivers the unsurprising news that opposites attract.