2010 is the year of Gerard Butler. In January, he enjoyed box-office success with the action thriller Law Abiding Citizen. Now, the Scottish actor is back on our screens this week with not one, but two films: the comedy The Bounty Hunter and 3D animation movie How to Train Your Dragon.
In Dragon, Butler shows off his voiceover skills as Stoick the Vast, but there's more about that production in our 'Also Showing' section. What everyone is really interested in is The Bounty Hunter. After all, that is the film that has rumoured to have brought Butler and his co-star former Friends actress Jennifer Aniston closer, with rumours running rife that the pair are now dating.
Despite Butler constantly denying that he is not romantically involved with Brad Pitt's ex-wife, there's no doubt that the duo have been playing up to the media – with them being snapped together in and out of work.
Butler attended Aniston's 40th birthday vacation with best pal Courteney Cox, and she is always seen being tremendously affectionate and flirtatious with him on the red carpet.
At the 2009 Dubai International Film Festival in December, Butler told Emirates Business: "I wish everyone would stop asking me about dating Jennifer Aniston. Don't get me wrong, she is one of my most favourite people on this planet; she's so cool. But there's nothing there. And I don't like how it gets dragged out in the media all the time."
Even if they're not really dating, 40-year-old Butler is old enough to know how the Hollywood game works – and the photo opportunities he and Aniston have given the media have worked treats for the pair. According to Boxofficemojo.com, The Bounty Hunter went straight to number three in the US box-office chart last weekend, raking in $20.7 million (Dh76m) in just two days.
The film is yet to be released outside North America, but it's easy to predict that it will do very well in Europe, as well as Asia and the Middle East. Even Dubai Mall's Reel Cinemas has had the film's poster at the entrance to the grand parking for more than two weeks.
It just goes to prove that a movie doesn't have to be good in order to be successful, because the majority of critics haven't given it favourable reviews. Rottentomatoes.com reports that eight per cent of critics gave The Bounty Hunter a positive review, based on 95 reviews. It also holds a "generally unfavourable" score of 25 out of 100 at Metacritic.
The film attempts to lasso an action thriller into a marital comedy about battling former spouses to the detriment of both story lines. The mishmash ends up as a thoroughly unfunny adult cartoon where neither the heroes' lives nor their love lives are in any serious jeopardy.
Thrillers and comedies essentially inhabit different worlds, so any marriage between the genres is likely to be a rocky one.
Director Andy Tennant only exacerbates these genre tensions by keeping the action at the level of TV skit comedy, whose silliness completely undermines the thriller elements.
Butler plays Milo Boyd, a former New York cop whose divorce supposedly triggered enough drinking to get him booted off the force. Now he's a bounty hunter, with the mob after him because of gambling debts.
Meanwhile, Aniston plays Nicole Hurley, a New York News reporter who skips a court date while chasing a story about a possible police cover-up. A bench warrant is issued to bring her in. A mutual friend of both former spouses seems to be involved in the cover-up, Nicole's besotted news colleague is stalking her (SNL's Jason Sudeikis) and collection goons are searching for Milo. Then a bad guy (played by Paul Greene) tracks them down.
The humour is played far too broadly, and the situations in Sara Thorp's script all are lethally predictable. Behaviour is dictated not by character but comedy needs.
The differences between Milo and Nicole are made convincingly unreconcilable so that the eventual thaw in their relationship has all the credibility of a $3 bill.