My Super Ex-Girlfriend has been getting whipped by stinky reviews, but when I saw it tonight, I laughed a lot and awarded it my favorite Mass-Market Hollywood Summer Blockbuster Movie so far this season.
My feelings may have been inspired in part by my moviegoing environment. The composition of the sold-out theater off Times Square was my preferred type: the model New York City crowd, equally attentive and boisterous. Even a tourist in the audience would have recognized this from the start. The trailer for Pathfinder was booed loudly by nearly everyone, while cheers were bestowed upon Will Ferrell’s newest, the promising Stranger Than Fiction, in which he plays a man shocked to learn he’s a character in a novel.
The general reaction to My Super Ex-Girlfriend was laughter and although the film is nothing super overall, the dialogue, characters and situations are engaging and lowbrow silly. (It’s likely relevant that director Ivan Reitman also helmed the beloved Ghostbusters.) Uma Thurman1, who makes me want to spell hot as hawt and add several t’s, plays a rare and welcome comedic role as Jenny Johnson, a mousy bespectacled art gallery owner who moonlights as the superhero G-Girl. Despite having the worst name ever, she saves Gotham from crime, fires and errant missile strikes with the standard superpowers of strength, speed and flight. Matt Saunders (Luke Wilson) falls for Johnson after a romantic subway/purse-snatching encounter, only to learn her secret identity comes with an intense overpossessiveness. He dumps her and takes up with his true love, the blandly angelic young hottie in his office played by Anna Faris. Doubly enraged, G-Girl spends most of the rest of the movie exacting psycho revenge on Saunders, doing unspeakable things to his apartment, car, goldfish, forehead and sanity, then gets him fired. Wilson, whose movie characters are often quietly befuddled types, is the perfect everyman foil to Thurman’s split persona.
Amusing support is presented courtesy of Rainn Wilson (the jerk with glasses from the American version of The Office), who plays Saunders’ wizened-sarcastic coworker/friend, a character required by law in romantic comedies, and Eddie Izzard as the least charismatic supervillain ever, which is why he’s so funny, actually. He keeps a keg-sized meteor that can sap G-Girl’s powers in his refrigerator, right next to a ham.
The special effects seem purposely cheesy, especially a wince-worthy approximation of the Statue of Liberty, from which Saunders is suspended upside-down after a particularly nasty spat with the ex. When the special effects are good, they’re used in situations unbelievable to the point of hilarity, as when G-Girl winds up a live shark and pitches it at Saunders through his apartment window, where it thrashes around the floor, snapping at him and taking large bites out of his furniture.
The editing is rough around the edges, plot elements are introduced and never followed-up on, and I think there were continuity issues with G-Girl’s costume, which seemed slightly different each time she suited up. Of vexation only to New Yorkers are the disjointed circuits through the streets of Manhattan, wherein a character emerges from a building downtown, then turns the corner onto an uptown street.
Despite these flaws, I was entertained by My Super Ex-Girlfriend. So sue me. It won’t win any awards or, apparently, any other sorta-positive reviews, but I found it funny.
1One of our frequent Friday Night Movie guests, Jason, who’s a designer at a religious trade press in the city, said he had lunch once with Uma’s dad Robert, a tall religious studies professor at Columbia who sports an ill-fitting glass eye. Jason said the prof had trouble eating his salad without getting it all over himself, but that one would be hard pressed to notice the mess when there was that eye to avoid staring at. [back]