What could possibly be better than bringing your ex-wife to jail? In the movie The Bounty Hunter, Gerard Butler, as Milo, gets this opportunity of a lifetime. Milo is an ex-cop that fills his time with drinking and the occasional bounty hunting job. His ex-wife Nicole, played by Jennifer Aniston, is a high ranking, tenacious crime reporter for the New York Daily News.

 Milo is assigned to drag Nicole to jail because she skipped out on her court date in order to uncover the details in a suspicious suicide story. This is practically the entire synopsis of the story. While it is nearly impossible to fill up an entire 106 minutes with this story line, director Andy Tennant manages to do so by throwing in constant bickering between Milo and Nicole, a few action scenes and a trip to Atlantic City.

While the plot synopsis at first sounds somewhat unique, the actual movie is anything but. The plot aims at being unique and different, but the aim misses largely and The Bounty Hunter becomes yet another predictable and typical romantic comedy. Sure, the plot was spiced up a bit with a couple of mediocre action scenes, but overall it was the same old story line.

Throughout the entire movie Milo and Nicole bring up their past memories and mistakes they made in their marriage. Not once was the audience deceived into thinking the two were not going to be together in the end. The movie failed to bring in any element of surprise or astonishment; even the murder case was predictable. All of the loose ends seemed to be tied in the audience’s mind before the movie was even halfway through.

Not only was the movie itself hard to watch, the entire time it was impossible to forget you were watching Jennifer Aniston and Gerard Butler. The characters failed to be unique and different. Gerard Butler could have been playing the crude and heartless Mike from the Ugly Truth while Jennifer Aniston could have been the uptight Beth in He’s Just Not That into You. The characters’ names were forgotten within the first ten minutes of the movie. Instead of delving into the emotions of the characters, you found yourself watching the big time stars Aniston and Butler.

Not only did the characters fail to be distinct, so did their chemistry. It was almost painful to watch Aniston and Butler try to force an onscreen chemistry that obviously was not there. No one was fooled into thinking their relationship went any deeper than the surface. The lack of chemistry between the two was impossible to miss and made the movie that much more boring.

The movie just dragged on and the forced jokes were almost unbearable. Sure, there were a few bright spots, and a couple chuckles from the audience here and there, but the movie failed to captivate audiences overall. It was forgettable, tedious, dull, lackluster and incredibly predictable. You could not help checking the time to see when the lifeless movie would stop dragging on and just get to the point.