Uma Thurman
Luke Wilson
Anna Faris
Rainn Wilson
Eddie Izzard
directed by
Ivan Reitman
If you want to find out the plot to My Super Ex-Girlfriend, just read the movie title. That’s pretty much it. Guy goes out with girl, girl turns out to be superheroine who’s also jealous and neurotic, guy dumps neurotic superheroine with ensuing chaos and hilarity.
Of course there are good bits. They mostly involve costumes and special effects, but they’re still good: Uma’s outfits, the shark through the window (whoever did the CGI job on that deserves an Oscar), lobbing a van. Apart from that there are a few good one-liners (the bad guy sashays out of the room, saying “…or you can email me at professorbedlam.com – all one word”) and Uma does an okay acting job.
But please don’t go and see this film expecting stellar acting, or a juicy plotline, or convincing characters. The superheroine is quite fun – by day she’s neurotic and possessive Jenny Johnson, and by night she’s G-Girl, just as neurotic and possessive but with scarier powers.
Luke Wilson’s character, though? At one point, while G-Girl is trying to indulge in some mid-air nookie with him, he complains of feeling emasculated. Um – yes, that will happen if you play the wet dishrag through the entire film. His best friend Vaughn (played by Rainn Wilson) is a one-dimensional misogynist whose entire dialogue consists of lines like “you sleep with them once, you move on”.
Eddie Izzard plays G-Girl’s arch-nemesis, with a decent back story but abysmal acting (and what is that American accent? Couldn’t they have just made him English? All the other baddies are). His part in the film, and the others’, are all tied up at the end in nice little romantic pairings that are about as convincing as Tom Cruise getting it on with Katie Holmes.
So it’s a bit predictable, but it also has fun quirky parts like when G-Girl burns the word ‘Dick’ into her ex-boyfriend’s forehead the night before a big meeting. In other words, this film is good for a laugh and it’s great if you don’t want to think – but with some more fleshed out characters and a bit more effort, it could have been a lot more.
