Review: My Super Ex-Girlfriend

Like Failure to Launch, My Super Ex-Girlfriend is a movie that takes a cool concept, plays with it, and ultimately lets it die a horrible death. Also like Failure to Launch, My Super Ex-Girlfriend is essentially a collection of loosely related skits with no cohesive soul. Some people think that high concepts like those are doomed to failure, to abuse, to be mere footnotes in film history (and probably not even that: mere statistics in some past box office report is more likely); I disagree. I think that films like Batman Begins and Spiderman 2 show that high concept premise, great cast, high profile director, and millions of dollars in the budget doesn't have to produce steaming turds. More often than not steaming turds are what we get--even with all those components--but it doesn't HAVE to be that way. Failure to Launch could've been a classic rom com, but it wasn't; same with My Super Ex-Girlfriend. My Super Ex-Girlfriend had multiple failures to it: structure of the story, failure to develop it's super-hero mythology (essentially giving the G-Girl--Uma Thurman's character--whatever powers are convenient to the scene and an arch-nemesis who has no powers at all, and is apparently not really all that villainous), and in the end it abandons even the remaining tatters of its soul. Just another movie I'd like to remake someday, and do it right. It felt like it wanted to be about how every guy might think they'd want a super-hero girlfriend, but how in reality they're still just people too...but with much more capacity to do damage when they get jealous, possessive, etc. And how, ultimately, we all just want that special someone who brings sunshine into our day, even if they're just a normal, average human being like us. It failed, among many other reasons, because it focused far too much on all the supposedly funny (but really more sad and pathetic) things that G-Girl does to her ex-boyfriend after he breaks up with her. After a while I started getting tired of all the random evilness this supposedly good character was doing to get even with her ex-boyfriend. I guess there's so much inherently wrong with the film that I can't even pin down where to start. Maybe if I get my hands on the script it'll be more apparent. *sigh* Another one bites the dust.