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An almost-kind-of perfect date movie!
I don’t know if I would say I had exactly high hopes for My Super Ex-Girlfriend, the latest comedy from director Ivan Reitman(Producer/Star of Ghostbusters I & II). From the trailers, it appeared it would be a light, breezy comedy of little relevance yet might provide a few laughs. I can report that the movie does suc-ceed on this note, fulfilling my expectations at the most minimal level, although it also caught me off-guard a couple of times with well-placed and unexpected gut-busters of laughter I wasn’t expecting.
My Super Ex-Girlfriend is the story of a luckless shmoe named Matt Saunders(played by Luke Wilson, infinitely more likeable than his brother Owen) who can’t catch a break at work or in the romance department. His overbearing boss(Wanda Sykes, annoying no matter what she does) is constantly catching him in unintentional sexual gaffes with his co-worker Hannah(the ador-able yet only vaguely talented Anna Faris) and desperately wants to report him for sexual harassment at any opportunity. Owen has also just broken up with his girlfriend, whom his office mate/best friend Vaughn(Rainn Wilson) refers to as “psychotic”. Yet one day, prompted by Vaughn, Matt approaches a bespectacled young woman on a New York train and asks her out. He is brusquely rebuffed, of course, but she catches a glimmer of Matt’s gallantry when he chases after a purse snatcher who makes off with her bag. The young woman, Jenny Johnson(Uma Thurman) decides to take Matt up on his offer after all, and they start a sometimes-awkward courtship.
What Matt doesn’t know, until about their third date, is that Jenny is actually New York’s own super-heroine G-Girl(an unin-spired nom de guerre…I wish the writers had taken at least another 30 seconds to come up with something better). G-Girl has all the powers of Superman(or Supergirl, if you’d prefer): flight, strength, invulnerability, super-breath, a type of heat vision and of course super-speed. She’s also an infinitely more intriguing hero than Bryan Singer’s reinvention, playing a few doors down in the multiplex. Jenny reveals her secret identity to Matt after a night of truly rough sex, a hilarious scene which ends with walls being cracked, a shattered bed, and Matt limping to work the next morning. Matt’s amazed of course, to find out he’s dating/doing G-Girl herself, which of course in standard guy terms means he’s hit the jackpot on the dating and sexual level. What guy hasn’t dreamed of being with his girlfriend, only to have her somehow reveal that she’s actually the impossibly hot chick next door whom we’ve only been able to fantasize about being with?
Problems arise of course when Matt realizes his new super-girlfriend is desperately needy and possibly a trifle unbalanced mentally. She’s insanely jealous of coworker Hannah, and right-fully so. From almost the get-go, it's obvious Hannah is secretly attracted to Matt, in spite of the fact she’s dating a male super-model(Mark Consuelos, otherwise known as Mr. Kelly Ripa). Yes, Jenny/G-Girl might be 2 sandwiches short of a picnic, but she’s no idiot. Her instability so worries Matt that he decides to break up with her, which of course is when his problems really kick into overdrive. The most obvious and immediate moral of the story is that if you break up with someone possessing super-powers, you do so at your own risk. G-Girl turns out to be the super ex-girl-friend from hell: she heat-visions a profanity into Matt’s forehead for all to see, throws his car into orbit with the words “you suck” scratched onto either side, and rips his clothes off at invisible super-speed during a board meeting with some overseas clients, leaving him stark naked and successively fired.
There are plenty of laughs to be found in My Super Ex-girl-friend, but I won’t reveal them all. Suffice to say that there are actually three more sex scenes in the film, one of them during a cute homage to the original “Can You Read My Mind” flight sequence from the 1978 Superman, and all of them very funny. The special effects overall are decent, although after a while during a later fight sequence with a suddenly super-empowered Hannah, your brain goes into CGI overload. The first appearance of G-Girl in flight is especially galling, since the effects folk at Digital Domain didn’t digitize out one of the harness strings sup-porting Uma, although subsequent flight sequences suspend the audience’s disbelief sufficiently.
The movie starts to lose its momentum, unfortunately, upon the introduction of Professor Bedlam(cross-dressing comedian Eddie Izzard), G-Girl’s arch-nemesis and New York’s resident super-villain. Although Bedlam has some amusing dialogue and is sufficiently vainglorious and megalomaniacal for your standard super-villain(Bedlam actually doesn’t like being called a “super” villain), Izzard’s performance is barely competent at best, and is no match for Thurman’s firm hold on her character’s own tenta-tive grip on reality. When Bedlam manages to get the desperate Matt to agree to aid in a scheme to remove G-Girl’s powers once and for all, you actually feel sorry for Jenny. Disturbed though she is, we know she is only looking to find understanding and true love with Matt, while unknowingly walking into what could well be a fatal trap. In other words, director Reitman subtly manages to capture in this scene what every single human has ever felt between the moment they express their true love for someone, and the subsequent instant when we find out for certain if our love will be requited—and the sense of our heart’s own self-betrayal sets in if the answer is “no”.
The two leads, Thurman and Wilson, have as much fun as possible with their roles, and show wry comedic talent. Anna Faris’ Hannah is only a mildly smarter character than her blonde chick from the Scary Movie series, and Rainn Wilson as Vaughn plays the typical horn dog best friend from any buddy movie ever filmed—dispensing inaccurate and unwanted explicit sexual advice to Wilson’s character. Kudos to Reitman for filming his super-hero movie in New York and capturing the city’s singular flavor. It’s been obvious throughout Reitman’s career that he has a love affair with the Big Apple, and also a big showing up on Superman Returns, which should have been filmed in New York but wasted millions building half-sets in Australia. My Super Ex-Girlfriend is the type of movie which probably won’t have the longest legs at the box office, so see it now while you can…just make sure that if you’re thinking of breaking things off with your date afterward, that she doesn’t have super powers.
Or else.
The other super-hero event of the summer; infinitely better than Bryan Singer's Superman Returns in almost every way.
Drawing on Superman/Supergirl folklore, Reitman even gives Jenny(Uma Thurman) a secret identity with double first initials a la Lois Lane or Lana Lang.
Jenny begins to suspect something's amiss when she observes Matt's(Luke Wilson) interaction with co-worker Hannah(Anna Faris).
Bryan Singer, take note: In My Super Ex-Girlfriend, the homages to Superman: The Movie are done with a consid-ered lack of self-consciousness.
Remember: If you break things off with a mentally unbalanc-ed super-heroine, you do so at your own risk.
