Review: Warring couple scenario, 'The Bounty Hunter'

Film: The Bounty Hunter
Cast: Gerard Butler, Jennifer Aniston
Director: Andy Tennant
Rating: * * ½

This action-comedy has Jennifer Aniston and Gerard Butler, stars on the up, as warring exes with ‘Fool’s Gold’ Andy Tenant at the helm. Tenant tries to re-formulate his warring couple scenario from his previous flop ‘Fool’s gold’, scenarist Sarah Thorp does her bit to add a bit of sparkle to the scenario and dialogues but it still doesn’t shine like it should have.

Ace reporter Nicole(Aniston) is so engrossed in getting to the bottom of an intriguing suicide/murder story that she fails to appear in court, is issued a warrant and her ex-husband, who is an ex-cop and newly recruited bounty hunter, Milo Boyd(Butler) is set on the job to get her to the authorities. In an attempt to add more juice to the story a clueless reporter(Jason Sudeikis) who is shown to be in love with Nicole, follows her around , gets mistaken for Milo and is beaten up but never quits.

The story is just a setup for a quasi road movie where Boyd is seen chasing Nicole while she chases her ‘big’ story. Do Boyd and Nicole belong together? The narrative just flits around without really establishing concrete reasons to bring them back together.
Contrivances abound and predictability becomes the norm.
There are pitifully few surprises in store.

The star actors have their few and far between becoming moments but there’s very little jest and the light-hearted fun elements are sorely missing from the entire narrative which has underdeveloped thriller subplots and appears to be bursting at the seams with extras that have piteously little to do.The runtime is also a tad too long at well over 100 minutes.

Also, we’ve seen Aniston in a similar role in ‘The break-up’ and Butler also displayed similar chops in ‘The Ugly truth.’ Buttler continues in his unintelligible vein with his thick Irish brogue coloring every word he utters while Aniston’s performance is so similar to what she’s done before that it’s not funny anymore.

Save for the duo running around in circles and the Taj Mahal, a hotel in Atlantic city, there’s not much newness in this regurgitated wannabe comedy.