She’s the control-freak morning news show producer who evaluates potential dates according to a checklist. He’s an abrasive chauvinist commentator just hired by her station to help juice up the ratings.

You can now close your eyes and write the remainder of “The Ugly Truth” in your head: Opposites repel; opposites attract; opposites eventually find themselves bickering, but finally falling in love during a remote segment on live television.
This romantic comedy isn’t completely unwatchable, partly because of the appealing performances of Katherine Heigl and Gerard Butler, who almost manage to humanize these pre-programmed creations, and partly because of the film’s intriguingly sexualized undercurrents. This is surely the first romantic comedy to feature both simulated fellatio and a pair of vibrating underwear.
Heigl plays the uptight Abby, who is predictably aghast to hear the cable-access ranting of Mike, who insists that men are only interested in one thing and that women who think otherwise are either ugly or foolish or (mostly likely) both. Imagine Abby’s dismay, then, when the next morning Mike turns up in the studio, where he immediately grabs the attention of viewers by exposing on-air the sexless marriage of the show’s airhead anchors (John Michael Higgins and Cheryl Hines).
For most of the film’s running time, the characters in “The Ugly Truth” behave according to no known laws of human logic. The screenplay, by Nicole Eastman, Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith, merely poses the actors in bizarre, semi-humiliating scenarios designed for maximum yuks. This occasionally results in laughs, such as the Cyrano-style sequence in which Mike guides Abby through her first date with a hunky doctor named Colin (Eric Winter). But the filmmakers’ approach never allows us to become invested in these people’s lives, perhaps because they never seem like actual people.
Heigl and Butler are both fabulously attractive, but lack any actorly narcissism; they’re hot but they don’t seem to know it — which makes them that much hotter. Yet despite a few nice scenes together in which Mike recounts the litany of bad relationships that led him to permanent bachelorhood, director Robert Luketic (”Legally Blonde”) never allows his actors to breathe before thrusting them into another crude scenario.
The crudest of these finds Abby at a corporate dinner, wearing a pair of vibrating panties, purchased for her by Mike to help her loosen up. The remote control ends up in the hands of a boy at a neighboring table (don’t ask), and things only turn more, um, exclamatory from there. There’s something interesting at work here: Are the screenwriters suggesting, almost four decades after the publication of Erica Jong’s “Fear of Flying,” that it’s finally time for women to luxuriate in their own orgasms within the rom-com genre? Is Luketic offering a rebuke to that most exalted of chick flicks, “When Harry Met Sally ...,” which famously only allowed its heroine a fake orgasm?
Yes. No. Maybe. Finally, who cares? Whatever serious inquiry into human sexuality “The Ugly Truth” might be flirting with is finally sabotaged by the obvious twists, the broad jokes and the shameless pandering to the hopeless romantics in the crowd. Opposites attract. Every chauvinist secretly has a heart of gold. Trust that your Prince Charming is out there. Cliche, cliche, cliche, blah, blah, blah.
Instead of reinventing the chick-flick genre, this movie just ends up cementing its bad name.