The Bounty Hunter: Double take

The costumes in “The Bounty Hunter” are horrible. Gerard Butler is dressed in a $20 plaid gap shirt, ill-fitting khakis, and chunky sneakers. Jennifer Aniston spends the movie in a skirt so tight that it gives her a pooch the entire time. That’s right. Jennifer “90 pound” Aniston appears to have a belly because the costume designer was too concentrated on making her boobs look good.

My passion about the costuming is about as much emotion I can scrounge up about this romantic? Comedy? I admit I was expecting it to be bad, really bad, Godzilla (1998) bad. I now see that this was actually wishful thinking because at least bad is something. The Bounty Hunter is nothing.

Gerard Butler is an ex-cop turned bounty hunter. Jennifer Aniston is a hard-hitting reporter who skips bail for a minor crime to pursue a story involving a suicide/murder/police cover up. Gerard Butler and Jennifer Aniston wrestle and get back together and break up. And there is also a bookie looking for Butler to collect $11,000 in kneecaps. Yar di yar yar.

It reminded me, in some ways, of a screenplay I wrote when I was 18 about rival gangsters crews in Boston. It was a terrible screenplay because I didn’t know anything about gangsters, but I did know a lot of clichés. This holds true for screenwriter Sarah Thorp as well.

Cheap is the best way to explain this movie. Cheap clothes. Cheap lines. Cheap plot. Cheap acting. Gerard Butler appeared to be in a drunken black out for much of the movie. And for his sake I hope it’s true.

Christine Baranski was really great though. She mostly talking on the phone to Jennifer Aniston (her daughter) and made jokes about drag queens. Her name was Kitty Hurley.

Can we please have a movie about her?


I give this movie 1 Michael Douglas’s out of 5.