Written by Don Payne
Directed by Ivan Reitman
20th Century Fox
Released July 2006

I just finished watching this film on HBO. I have always enjoyed it, I think I may even have it on DVD somewhere. It’s a superhero romantic comedy. Luke Wilson plays a man named Matt who starts dating a seemingly shy woman named Jenny, played by Uma Thurman, who is secretly the superhero known as G-Girl. When Jenny starts acting unreasonably jealous and possessive Matt breaks up with her, and she proceeds to use her superpowers to ruin his life. When she finds him in bed with another woman (Anna Faris), she gets deadly. This leads Matt to team up with G-Girl’s archnemesis Professor Bedlam (Eddie Izzard) in a plot to strip G-Girl of her powers…

This is a coincidence because a couple of weeks ago I posted a link on Facebook to a now-deleted blog someone wrote wyere they referred to Prince’s film PURPLE RAIN as one of the most misognistic films they’d ever seen. As an 80’s kid Prince was part of my Holy Trinity (along with Michael Jackson and Madonna), and he’s still one of the greatest entertainers ever, in my opinion. But, yeah, I have to admit, Purple Rain is pretty bad in regards to its portrayal of women.

And when I posted that, someone else on my page brought up My Super Ex-Girlfriend as another example of a misogynistic movie. As uncomfortable as it is for me to admit, there is no denying that there is a strong underlying them of B****s be crazy, AMIRITE?!?, all throughout this film. Jenny goes psycho for no reason. Everything was going fine with her and Matt, but the minute she meets his attractive female coworker (Faris) she turns into hormonal rage and starts accusing him of cheating. She even almost puts millions of lives at risk, when she’s too busy being a b***h to Matt to stop a missile from striking New York City. The fact that Jenny’s actions are funny tends to gloss over how insane it is. Such as when she throws a killer shark into Matt’s apartment, and it almost eats him. It’s a great scene. But she’s trying to kill him, that’s nuts!

There’s also Wanda Sykes as Matt’s ball-busting boss, not the best example of a female character either.

OF course, it could be argued that Izzard’s character Bedlam is pretty stereotypical, too. The big bad supervillain, it turns out that his motivation is that he’s basically a lovesick ex of Jenny’s. That’s pretty pathetic. That would be like finding out that the reason Lex Luthor hates Superman is because Clark Kent didn’t ask him to the prom when they were in High School. And then there’s Rainn Wilson’s character, Matt’s best friend Vaughn. He’s a sleazeball, who spends most of the film making crude remarks about women while trying and failing to hit on them. And he gets rewarded in the end, in a post-credits scene, where he’s in bed with a beautiful woman (by lying to her, of course).

Still, for a $30 million movie, the special effects were pretty decent. I would like to see another take on a “superhero romantic comedy”, maybe something like This Means War, but where the characters are superheroes instead of C.I.A. agents.

Hmmm…perhaps I’ll get to work on that…