My Super Ex-Girlfriend
Given the low cost and high power of computer generated special effects, superhero movies are all the rage in Hollywood, from the revival of the Batman and Superman franchises, the continuing success of the Spider-Man franchise, the spectacle of Tim Allen as a superhero, and so on. So it’s not a surprise that someone would take CGI firepower and use it in a comedy, My Super Ex-Girlfriend
But what certainly seems like a clever Saturday Night Live bit never really does more than could be done in about four minutes on a Saturday night. The movie is padded with meeting the characters, seeing the relationship blossom, giving a reason for them to break up, THEN finally getting the break-up before having a somewhat forced resolution, ending the best part of the movie for the sake of it being a conventional film.
The best stuff that you’ve certainly seen in the commercials — G-Girl twisting a butcher knife with her bare hands during the break-up, flying off and busting through her now ex-boyfriend’s roof, flinging a live killer shark through a window — that’s all from the sequence in the middle, when she’s in deranged ex-girlfriend mode. The other stuff that’s added on, including a tiresome Lex Luthor-like nemesis, is what drags this film down. (And with all the padding, we never get the only interesting backstory: What G-Girl means, other than a blink-and-you-miss-it suggestion in a deleted scene that it might be a g-spot joke, which doesn’t make sense for the characters at all.)
It’s not the fault of the supporting cast that they’re underfoot. Rainn Wilson is good, as is Anna Faris, although Wanda Sykes is criminally wasted in this film. Eddie Izzard doesn’t really get the chance to shine that he deserves: His archvillainous Professor Bedlam is, frankly, kind of a wuss and clearly no match for G-Girl in any sense.
This isn’t a bad way to spend an evening for a superhero fan: The good stuff is pretty good, the special effects are neat (G-Girl’s flight and high-speed motion has a nice visual), there’s a number of DC Comics references (G-Girl spinning like a top to suck the oxygen away from a fire, super-breath and fire-vision, a creepy tryst a half-mile above Manhattan set to dopey Superman I romantic music that terrifies Luke Wilson’s non-flying character) and the performers do a good job with very ordinary material.
But it’s a rental for all but the most obsessive Uma Thurman or Luke Wilson fans.
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