"Super Ex" a power drain
Uma Thurman gamely sends up her tough-girl, kick-ass, Kill Bill persona in My Super Ex-Girlfriend, but the nearly clever idea that powers the screenplay sputters into brownout mode early on, developing rolling blackouts and cutting off vital blood supply to brain cells.
As the brown-bewigged Jenny, Thurman adopts a mousy librarian demeanor (even though Jenny, inexplicably, works at a high-end art gallery). As Jenny’s blonde alter-ego, the Fantastic-Fourish superhero “G-Girl,” the character is tricked out like Superman with laser vision and the ability to leap tall buildings in a single bound (and an allergy to extraterrestrial rocks).
But Jenny reveals her bipolar secret early on to new boyfriend Matt Saunders (Luke Wilson), thus sidelining the movie’s one running joke — the powerful woman who is secretly insecure, a jealous bunny-boiler in the making. As Glenn Close would say in Fatal Attraction, which this movie vaguely references, she WON’T be IGNORED.
With the full subtext now on display, like underwear worn over street clothes, the story has nowhere to go, no ideas to push, no opportunity for playing peekaboo with G-Girl’s embarrassing, relationship-killing secret: She can save Metropolis from ruin but she’s jealous and possessive.
What to do? Some filler with sidekick characters, and a few Jokes that repeat like the reprise of title songs in a musical — here’s a scene of sex so super the bed moves, and here’s a scene of buddies discussing sex so super the bed moves, and here’s, yes, more bed-moving. At least Brigadoon only showed up once every hundred years.
Luke Wilson’s reaction shots are fun, but you can’t hang a movie on them. (If it were Owen Wilson, maybe.)
Thurman is clearly more comfortable with comedy than any other acting style, and she’s good at it. Her Quentin Tarantino roles have all been essentially comedic. Super Ex-Girlfriend, though more obviously billed as a comedy, is a bad one, a lazy and half-baked one, and it’s a step down for her. She’s not even the lead — Wilson’s reaction shots play the lead. G-Girl’s super powers are indicated by cheesy special effects, the kind that would be impressive on small-screen Smallville; she she goes into action, there’s a watery ripple effect as if G-Girl is disturbing the cosmos just a little. Her powers seem to reside in placing a watermark on the screen; could G-Girl be the first heroine for the paper-supplies industry?
Screenwriter Don Payne (who is writing next year’s Fantastic Four and the Silver Surfer) is clearly more interested in the superficial aspects of the high-concept, comics-based joke than in mining the rich, deep vein of Jenny/G-Girl’s personality conundrum. Comics are not superficial, though. The best of them explore the painfully human — how to fit in when you’re different, how to turn your back on those you love to protect them from retribution by your enemies — and movie comedy should demand no less. We should laugh at but also feel for the plight of poor Jenny — so competent. So helpless.
That’s not to say there are no good scenes, like one in which Jenny and Matt have dinner out with Matt’s work colleague Hannah (Anna Faris). A missile is headed for midtown, and the other diners are glued to the TV, but jealous Jenny doesn’t want to leave Matt alone with an attractive woman. “Shouldn’t SOMEONE do something?” Matt hisses to Jenny. “Maybe SOMEONE needs just ONE NIGHT OFF!” she hisses back, like any couple bickering over who did what in the relationship.
I wouldn’t go on at length about a movie like this except that the missed opportunity is profound. Fatal Attraction is in desperate need of a feminist makeover, but I’d rather see a serious one than a comic send-up (it is its own send-up, really). And superhero comics are all about the strain of keeping subtext in place, the exhaustion of keeping the secret life and the public life in balance. The chief mistake of Super Ex-Girlfriend is that Jenny/G-Girl should be the protagonist, not the less-interesting Matt, whose goal is to get a hot chick who won’t turn out to be high-maintenance. That’s too common a movie topic, and it’s been addressed countless times.
No, what this needed to be was a hip, breezy summer spin on The Upside of Anger, that movie in which Kevin Costner is strangely attracted to Joan Allen even though she’s a raving bitch. As a woman, I want to see such a movie in all its variations. And I want to see Uma Thurman (or any actress!) play a smart, strong, funny woman, not the male-fantasy version of it.
Drat. I was hoping this movie would be surprisingly good. Unfortunately, not everyone shares your insights regarding comicbooks, and some less enlightened critics may blame the film’s shortcomings on its “source material.” This doesn’t bode well for the nest Fantastic Four movie. Oh, well.
A hot day in the city, so I took my 15-year-old to the Plex for its air conditioning. I loved My Super Ex-girlfriend, although my son had the more sensible negative reaction. Uma Thurman is rejected by an ordinary man. I found that unbelievable and hilarious. Thurman’s character found it unbelievable and annoying; her annoyance added to my mirth. My son, going into grade 11 at Stuyvesant, sat stoney-faced.
Saw it this afternoon and was mightily impressed. Unlike most comedies today, it had an actual plot and character development. Yes, there are ways it could’ve been improved, but that’s true of most movies. Overall, I enjoyed it and think you’ve underrated it. (And for the record, I once dated a woman who makes Uma Thurman look like a boy–and she was even crazier than G-Girl. Breaking up with her without suffering major physical injury was one of the trickiest things I ever pulled off. No woman, no matter how hot she is, is worth that kind of insanity.)