My Super Ex-Girlfriend is a film released on July 21, 2006. The film is a "romantic comedy with a superhero twist". It was directed by Ivan Reitman and stars Luke Wilson, Uma Thurman, Anna Faris, Wanda Sykes, Rainn Wilson, and Eddie Izzard.
Plot
Frustrated by his lack of progress in asking out secret crush Hannah (Anna Faris), Matt (Luke Wilson) starts dating shy stranger Jenny (Uma Thurman), whom he meets on the subway. While on the subway, Matt pursues and retrieves Jenny's purse which was stolen by a thief, thereby becoming Jenny's "hero". After several dates, Jenny displays increasingly neurotic and aggressive behavior, becoming more demanding and ultimately injuring Matt the first time they have sex. Soon after, Jenny reveals to him that she is in fact a superhero, G-Girl, who accidentally absorbed powers such as flight, superhuman strength and speed, invulnerability, super breath, heat vision, and super senses after she was exposed to a crashed meteorite as a teenager.
As Matt and Hannah's friendship develops further, and after becoming aggravated with Jenny's escalating jealousy, Matt ends the relationship. An angered Jenny vows to make Matt regret the decision, using her superpowers to publicly embarrass him, throwing his car into space and eventually causing him to lose his job when she stripped him naked during an important meeting. Professor Bedlam (Eddie Izzard), a former boyfriend and ex-best friend of Jenny, and now G-Girl's arch-nemesis, contacts Matt in order to enlist his aid in defeating her. Matt refuses and makes plans to leave the city. As he does so he is contacted by Hannah, and after confessing their feelings to one another, they end up in bed.
Jenny (as G-Girl) discovers them in bed the next day. Enraged and jealous, she attacks the pair with a great white shark. Angered, Matt contacts Professor Bedlam and agrees to help him defeat her, as long as Bedlam retires from being a supervillain. He instructs Matt to lure Jenny to a meeting where she can be exposed to a piece of the meteorite which gave her superpowers, telling Matt that this will draw away her powers, leaving her a mere mortal. Matt agrees and meets Jenny for a candlelit dinner at his apartment, under the pretense of wanting to resume their relationship. However, Hannah arrives to see Jenny sitting on Matt's lap. The two women fight, and in the struggle Jenny's superhero identity is revealed to Hannah. Bedlam's trap is sprung, and the energy that gave Jenny her powers is drained back into the meteorite, incapacitating Jenny.
Professor Bedlam appears, but reveals that he has no intention of keeping his promise to retire from villainy and in fact plans to take the powers for himself. While he and Matt fight, Jenny crawls to the charged meteorite attempting to regain her powers; Hannah intervenes just as Jenny grabs the meteorite, which explodes in a burst of power. Both Hannah and Jenny are catapulted off the roof, apparently to their deaths; however, Jenny appears within seconds, powers restored, threatening even more mayhem. Only the unexpected reappearance of Hannah — also exposed to the meteorite's energies and now also possessing the same powers as G-Girl — saves Matt. The second fight between Hannah and Jenny is a full-on super-brawl, destroying part of the neighboring properties. Finally, Matt reasons with them both and they cease fighting. He tells Jenny that Professor Bedlam is her true love; Jenny agrees and she embraces her former nemesis.
The next morning, Matt and Hannah meet up with Professor Bedlam (now just "Barry") and Jenny. As cries for help are heard from afar, Jenny and Hannah take off to tackle the emergency. Matt and Barry are left holding their girlfriends' purses and leave to have a beer together.
Cast
Production and release
Writer Don Payne conceived of the idea of his first film while working on The Simpsons television series, saying that as a fan of comics, the idea of a romantic comedy with a superhero twist was "a fitting first feature". The spec script (at that time called Super Ex) attracted the attention of production company Regency Enterprises and director Ivan Reitman, and the film was fast-tracked for production. Filming took place over four weeks in New York City.[1]
My Super Ex-Girlfriend debuted in the United States and Canada on July 21, 2006 in 2,702 theaters. In its opening weekend, the film grossed $8,603,460 and ranked #7 in the American and Canadian box office. The film proceeded to gross $22,530,295 in the United States and Canada and $38,365,852 in other territories for a worldwide gross of $60,896,147.[2] On the review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes, My Super Ex-Girlfriend received a rating of 41% based on 122 reviews.[3] On Metacritic, the film had an average score of 50 out of 100, based on 28 reviews.[4]
The film was released on DVD on December 19, 2006 with anamorphic widescreen and fullscreen presentations along with English Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround tracks. Special features include deleted scenes, Behind-the-scenes, and "No Sleep 2 Nite" music video by Molly McQueen.
Reception
Michael Medved gave My Super Ex-Girlfriend two and a half stars (out of four), saying that Thurman gave "...one of her best performances ever..." Medved also added that the "PG-13 rating" was inappropriate (due to several sex references and depictions) and that the movie should have had an "R rating" instead.[5]
Themes
In an unmade film idea circa 1998 about a group of superheroes that are forced to disband by the government and go their separate ways but then reunite to fight a common foe ("Watchmen-style"), filmmaker Kevin Smith said that one of the segments was about a female superhero who found her husband cheating on her, and then used her powers to torture him for doing so. He commented that My Super Ex-Girlfriend was basically a lighter, comedic treatment of the same topic, in an online posting about the similarity, as this was the second time a film had been made with a similar premise due to his neglect in writing it ("I never got around to writing it. Something else always came up") between this film and his idea, and gave the advice: "Don’t wait. When you’ve got what you feel is a cool, original story to tell… tell it quick. Because if you don’t, sooner or later, someone else will."[6]
References
External links
