It is always a mistake to expect much from the director of the gruntingly excreted Evolution (2002) & Kindergarten Cop (1990), but we do always hope for one or two laugh-out-loud scenes as in the formerly overrated, now noticeably dated Ghostbuster films (1984, 1989).

My Super Ex-Girlfriend (2006) opens with a rousing superhero action sequence of G-Girl (Uma Thurman) stopping a jewel heist via needlessly extreme measures. This seems to have pretty much exhausted the budget & there'll be no other big FX scenes after that, though there's a badly designed sequence which asks us to believe a rapidly spinning top can put out an enormous fire.

After introducing us to G-Girl's mightiness we immediately see her on the subway in her mild mannered secret identity, Jenny Johnson, art gallery curator, who like Clark Kent only needs a pair of glasses to not be recognized.

Uma is extremely capable in this sort of high camp material & proved in one of Batman & Robin (1997) when she started off as a sympathetic nurd then turned into sexy supervillain, Poison Ivy. She draws no such great distinction of character between G-Girl & Jenny Johnson, however, as she's just a hot babe with or without the glasses.

A dweeb of an office worker, Matt Saunders (Luke Wilson), & his horny though rarely laid best friend Vaughan (Rainn Wilson), are on the same subway when they spot Jenny. Vaughan's always encouraging Matt to hit on babes, living a little vicariously though it really never works out for Matt either. He makes his try for Jenny & she is just so not interested. He's a dork after all, & she's a hotsy totsy.

But then she gets purse-snatched by a guy who immediately leaps off the subway. Matt runs off risking life & limb to try to get her purse back for her. And though ultimately it's Jenny who saves the hour, Matt doesn't realize it, & can pose as the beauty's knight in armor.

She doesn't care that he wasn't necessary or effective. It's the first time anyone ever ran to her rescue, & she's frankly a little weary of always coming to other peoples' rescue. She falls instantly in love with the first guy who ever tried to save her form anything, latching onto him like a heartworm.

Right away he has suspicions she's nuts. But who cares when it's a babe who looks just like Uma Thurman. Soon they're sexually involved & he's lucky not to get his dick ripped off she's so aggressive in bed. He has to walk like John Wayne with shit in his diapers afterward, but he feels like a lucky guy.

However, for a long time Matt's actually been in love with Hannah (Anna Faris). She's a smart, pretty, sane, sweet girl & good friend, but she has seemed to be in a great relationship with a male supermodel (Mark Consuelos), so Matt never even revealed his true feelings.

That male model is a vain dim bulb & not faithful to Hannah, but Matt knows nothing of that, & always assumed he never had a chance. So he goes off & gets involved with a gorgeous gallery curator.

Not being the sharpest crayon in the pack himself, he's slow to realize it isn't all that much fun, more than a couple times, to almost have your dick ripped off every time he has sex.

Only when Jenny becomes increasingly needy & jealous does Matt begin to realize he's made a terrible mistake. With greatly premature declarations of love on their second date, Jenny reveals she's G-Girl, & whisks him about 3,000 feet into the sky to screw him in free-fall not paying any attention to the fact that he's scared to death, she's so lost in her own nutty little world where only her feelings count. To that extent, she's more the guy than Matt, & he does state for the record, "I feel emasculated."

Jenny can barely see anything about Matt except that she's latched onto him emotionally. She misuses her powers to manipulate & control him & behaves threateningly toward Hannah.

With bad advice from Vaughan he tries a "soft" way of breaking up with Jenny & she goes batshit, bending a big butcher knife in her bare hands, then using her super-breath to blow Matt across the room, threaten his life, attempt to kill his beloved goldfish by heating the water with her heat-vision, & rips off the roof of his top-floor apartment, having informed him that he'll soon be very, very sorry.

Also in the story is Professor Bedlam, formerly Barry, super-villain & nemesis of G-Girl. They used to hang out in highschool, two outcast geeks, until a meteor gave her superpowers & big boobs & she became popular, leaving Barry in the dust. He's spent his life since as a Lex Luther or Brainiac wannabe, harrassing G-Girl, & has at long last come up with a method of sapping G-Girl's powers back into the meteor.

Even after Jenny tried to boil his pet, instigated a beating by three bikers, & branded his forehead with the word "DICK" just before the meeting that will make or break his career; even after she wrecks his apartment a second time, threatens those dear to him, steals his car & puts it in orbit around the earth, & in general makes his life non-stop hell, Professor Bedlam cannot convince him to turn on her & help sap G-Girl's powers. Even in the midst of victimization he tries to protect her secret identity, being a good guy to the bitter end.

But when she fetches a Great White from the sea & tosses it through Hannah's bedroom window after he & Hannah made love, Matt realizes she's going to kill him eventually, & Hannah too. Her neuroses have really transformed her into a dangerous villain & she's totally incapable of realizing she's victimizing innocent people. At last he agrees to help Bedlam reduce G-Girl to a harmless ordinary nutjob.

As point of fact, for sake of humor that doesn't work all that well, the script has over-drawn Jenny's temper & shown that she doesn't possess even a fraction of the responsibility it would take to weild super powers.

It's clear she should indeed be rendered harmless in order to rant & rave in her little corner of the world unable to cause great harm. It's hard to imagine how she could redeem herself, & so we don't root for her to keep her powers. And most unfortunately, the script, with its misogynist bent, really just never realizes they've overdone it.

Yet it wouldn't be all that amusing to destroy G-Girl & she does get to stay a superhero, although the badly written story just never even tried to have a redemption sequence. The "happy" ending concocted never really gives us reason to believe Jenny won't continue to be a dangerous neurotic.

Nevertheless, Matt comes up with the "answer" to Jenny's problem, which we've seen coming from the moment we realized Professor Bedlam secretly loved her since highschool, so that's no surprise. Really the best moment in the story came earlier when Matt made love to Hannah & was thrilled that it didn't hurt.

When Hannah gets superpowers from the meteor, too, we're not even left to wonder if his sexlife will be painful after that; rather, we'll be shown that Hannah now makes love the same way Jenny did, violently. The string of lame codas to the film, including Hannah making violent love to Matt, means he'll have that John-Wayne-in-a-diapar walk for as long as they're involved.

Since I still remembered how glad Matt was not to have painful sex, I didn't believe that particular happy-ever-after would be happy, & Hannah's going to have to find a masochist who sincerely likes it rough. Again, the script doesn't realize what it has done, because the writer & director are working on automatic, & automatically assume beautiful girls are devouring dangerous cock-killers (nor was it a coincidence that Jenny's assault with the Great White is the ultimate toothed vagina).

The film's really over when Barry confesses love for Jenny & she stops being hell's woman scorned. And we'll assume Barry likes it rough & they'll be happy together, but I'm not convinced Jenny won't still be neurotic & kill him someday, as the story never really undoes the assumption that she is entirely devoid of sanity or self-control.

The script needed some going-over here & there to fix some of these unfunny issues. Plus the side-character played by Wanda Sykes needed a slightly bigger role or none at all, as her "best" scene was done in animation behind the closing credits rather than with Wanda in the film proper.

It would also have been nice if they could've budgeted at least one more good superpower sequence, as the "girl fight" near the end when Hannah gets powers to match Jenny's was animated in such a way as to make them look like the Tasmanian devil from the Warner brothers cartoons.

This is certainly not a good film & it's particularly bad in those last fifteen minutes or so of poorly done CGI fight. Then the series of meandering codas searching for a close just underscore the ineptitude of the filmmakers.

Even so, I did enjoy it as commercial dreck & thought Uma was radiant in some scenes. Uma's actually very good at comedy. No one else in the story could touch her, not even Eddy Izard as Professor Bedlam; she was hands-down the best comic here.

But by the time G-Girl was reduced to a dangerous deluded nut, the humor began to wane & Uma no matter how talented couldn't save it. If the ending had been merely as good as the middle of the film I'd've liked it a great deal more.

copyright © by Paghat the Ratgirl