^{Pools.  Gerard Butler could take them or leave them, really.}

Variety reports that Gerard Butler will be co-starring with Jennifer Aniston in a romantic comedy about a bounty hunter who has to chase down his ex-wife.  It will be directed by the guy who did Hitch and Fool’s Gold.  Now, let’s take a second to review the films Gerard Butler has chosen to do since 300 made him a star, shall we?

The Ugly Truth.  A rom-com opposite Katherine Heigl.  Basically a sequel to 27 Dresses.  Need I say more?

RocknRolla.  Not a great movie, but I’ll concede this one.  He was good in it.

Nim’s Island. Opposite Jodie Foster and Abigail Breslin in a The-Fairy-Tales-Come-True! story.  Definitely Brendan Fraser territory.

P.S. I Love You. Rom-com… Plays a dead guy… Opposite Hilary Swank… And Harry Connick Jr.  …P.S. this sucks.

And now an Aniston rom-com about bounty hunting.  Now is the time, fire your agent.  Look, I’m all for stretching yourself as an actor, but you can’t spend the rest of your career doing that mangina thing from Silence of the Lambs.  One more of these and you’ll henceforth be known as Gayowulf.

In The Ugly Truth (trailer after the jump), Katherine Heigl plays the bitchy career woman who’s unlucky in love, who gets stuck working with an incorrigible male chauvinist played by Gerard Butler. They can’t stand each other at first, but before you know it, blah blah blah it’s pretty much like 27 Dresses.  Let’s see if you can guess how this one ends:

A.    We find out Katherine Heigl was a man all along.
B.    Rosebud was the sled
C.    Katherine Heigl discovers Gerard Butler is really a sensitive soul and they fall in love when she convinces herself that she can change him
D.    Just when the aliens are about to win, we find out they’re allergic to water.
E.    Money shot

It’s a good thing Heigl isn’t forced to do sexist movies like Knocked Up anymore.  Now she can devote her full focus on these empowering stories of feminists, who find true happiness only when they meet the right guy.  Woohoo, girl power!
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RocknRolla expands into wide release today.  Below is my original review from a few weeks ago.

This is a review.  Reviews are longer than normal FilmDrunk posts because they bought pills off the internet.

Lock, Stock and a Revolving Snatch

Like the AC/DC of filmmaking, Guy Ritchie’s talent and his curse is the ability write the same thing slightly differently a hundred times.  That’s why RocknRolla can be better than 95% of the alternatives and still feel like something you’ve already seen.

Tom Wilkinson plays the old Ritchie standby, the wise but sadistic gangster who dispenses life lessons while torturing dudes and drinking tea.  Like Bricktop in Snatch, who enjoyed feeding his rivals to pigs, Wilkinson’s Lenny Cole favors dunking them in a crayfish-infested section of the Thames (Really?  Of all the nasty slimy disgusting invertebrates out there, the most intimidating thing you can think of is the edible mini lobster?). Cole also shares with Bricktop an affinity for grabbing guys by the balls as a negotiating tactic (Get it?  It’s like the opposite of a metaphor).

Wilkinson is mixed up in a complicated real estate deal with a Russian mobster, a gang of vaguely criminalish local toughs led by Gerard Butler, a young lawyer involved in a city zoning plan, and a rogue accountant played by the creepily lizard-like Thandie Newton.  Without getting into too much detail, the basic premise is that the Russian loans Cole his lucky painting (which we never actually see  – briefcase in Pulp Fiction much?), which is then promptly stolen by Cole’s Pete Doherty-esque junkie rockstar stepson who has recently faked his own death. The accountant falls for the thug and starts tipping him off to the time and locations of  her boss the Russian’s large-scale cash withdrawals, money with which the Russian intends to bribe Wilkinson, which Butler’s gang steals, but which ends up going to Cole anyway, since Butler’s guys only stole it from the Russian because they owed Cole money in the first place (though we’re never really clear on why).  You catch all that?  It doesn’t really matter.

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Two more new posters. First, via Empire, the folks behind Easy Virtue seem to have taken a put-lots-of-clothes-on-the-hot-chick and make-her-look-super-old kind of approach to their poster. And no, I have no idea why the f-ck there’s a chihuahua on it either.

Meanwhile, The Ugly Truth, an awful-sounding rom-com starring Katherine Heigl and Gerard Butler, has gone a simpler route. Katherine Heigl loves balls in her face, it seems to imply. In fact, next time you see her, just pin her down and squat over her while you dangle your wrinkly ball bag all up on her forehead and nose and lips and shit. She’ll try to protest, but that’s part of the game. She loves it. She’s just a really good actress.

A new TV spot was just released for RocknRolla, Guy Ritchie’s latest film which will hopefully put the Madonna period in his life behind him and usher in a golden era of not sucking.   The film stars Tom Wilkinson and Gerard Butler, and the TV spot has lots of thick Cockney voice over, which is a lot more fun if you picture the Geico lizard saying it.

[Watch the clip over at Empire]