When you see Gerard Butler‘s name attached to a movie, nine times out of ten you know exactly what you’re going to get. The gruffly charismatic leading man will almost inevitably be headlining a mid budget action thriller that allows him to punch, shoot and stab his way through an army of bad guys to save the day.
While that’s been true of his recent output, with Butler having made eleven movies since he last turned his hand to anything other than the genre that turned him into a star in the first place, he has tried at being a romantic lead on occasion, but things didn’t work out so well from a critical perspective.
That’s not to say it wasn’t successful; quite the opposite, in fact. 2009’s The Ugly Truth, which is now available to stream on Netflix, was a huge hit after earning $205 million at the box office. Butler plays an opinionated and misogynistic TV celebrity who sets his sights on Katherine Heigl’s producer, seeking to prove his outdated theories on the differences between men and women.
Based on that brief logline alone you can no doubt guess exactly where things are heading, and critics were quick to call out The Ugly Truth for its predictability. It currently holds a weak 14% score on Rotten Tomatoes, but a much higher audience rating of 60% proves that romantic comedies are catered and precision-engineered to appeal to their demographic, who always eat them up.
