By Sarah Sluis
Writer Sarah Thorp must have really got into watching Dog: The Bounty Hunter during the writers' strike,
because her recently greenlit script mines the subject for its meet-cute. Gerard Butler (P.S. I Love You) will play a bounty hunter hired to track down his ex-wife (Jennifer Aniston), who has skipped bail. If the movie dispenses with the ridiculousness right off the bat, I see a lot of potential: Romantic comedies often use unbelievable contrivances to get couples to hate each other (the sloppily executed misunderstanding is my pet peeve), but the premise itself makes the inevitable verbal sparring believable by default.
The project will be directed by Andy Tennant, who has made a career out of mediocre romantic comedies (although I really liked Ever After). He most recently directed Fool's Gold, which, like this bounty-hunting film, placed its unhappy couple in the midst of a money-grubbing plot. In Sweet Home Alabama, he directed Josh Lucas in a vulgar-but-redeeming hick role, which he could have a chance to reprise here, either with Butler, Aniston, or both. Given that the most prominent cultural
image of a bounty hunter is the blond, mulletted Dog: The Bounty Hunter I mentioned earlier, and his
similarly bleached blonde wife/assistant, I believe I'm making a safe assumption about their characterization. Although romantic comedies are a pet genre for me, I'm constantly getting my hopes dashed. This year's 27 Dresses was the most palatable of the bunch, but inspired this observation from our critic Daniel Eagan's review: "Romantic comedies are becoming an endangered species in part because they are so predictable."
There's hope: Most of my favorite romantic comedies over the past few years have deviated from the genre in a most important way: plot. Legally Blonde and The Devil Wears Prada, for example, were female-oriented career comedies with a romance thrown in. Judd Apatow-brand comedies (4The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Superbad) place males at the center of the romance, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day was a throwback to vintage screwball and Mean Girls (like Superbad) was a teen comedy with a side romance. Do these films signal a new age of romantic comedy? With the social conventions that blocked the love in most romantic comedies dead and gone, it appears career-romance or buddy comedy plus romance might be taking over.
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