THE BOUNTY HUNTER: making a monkey out of us

You know that old chestnut about putting a bunch of chimps together in a roomful of typewriters and eventually one of them will write a Shakespeare play. Well, long before they got anywhere near the Bard one of them wrote the screenplay for THE BOUNTY HUNTER. 

This alleged romantic-comedy-thriller stars Gerard Butler and Jennifer Aniston. He's Milo, the roguishly charming bounty hunter - a man with an adorable, alternately Irish and American accent, who tracks down people who've skipped bail, in return for a cut of the bail money. She's Nicole, a newspaper journalist whose good looks are interfering with her being taken seriously. Their two worlds collide when she fails to show up in court on a charge of assaulting a cop and he's given the task of finding her and hauling her in to face justice.
So why should we care about this scenario? Because she is his ex-wife, and they got divorced because they drove each other crazy. They haven't seen each other in three years and now they're being forced to spend time together and maybe - just maybe - rediscover what it was that drew them together in the first place.
I'm actually making this premise sound far more interesting than it is.
The plot involving Aniston stumbling onto a murder disguised as a suicide, corrupt cops and cartoon gangsters is nonsensical, ridiculous, boring and sloppily constructed. Characters awkwardly summarise the twists and turns of Milo and Nicole's pre-film relationship in conversations no real friends would ever have ("Hello Bob." "Hello Terry." "Terry before we talk about that thing that we've got together to talk about allow me to briefly recap on the major events in your life up to this point, just in case you've forgotten them.") and even if it were artfully done who cares anyway because Aniston and Butler exude all the chemistry of a wet newspaper. 
But it's not only the dialogue that's contrived. Scenes occur in weird places for no good reason other than it would have cost too much to perform the action in a plausible setting, and director Andy Tennant can't even be bothered to make sure his shots match. In one sequence we see Milo and Nicole park and exit his car followed a moment later by a long shot of them driving in the car and preparing to park it!
It all adds up to a big heap of uninspired, unimaginative rubbish and a huge waste of time. I had the misfortune to have THE BOUNTY HUNTER inflicted on me by Delta Airlines during a flight from Tokyo to Minneapolis. If I hadn't have been strapped into my seat at 38 thousand feet I'd have walked out.