Starring: Gerard Butler, Jennifer Aniston

Directed by Andy Tennant

Rating: *

After Gerard Butler's last rom-com The Ugly Truth we really thought it couldn't get uglier.

We were wrong.

The Bounty Hunter is the armpit of rom-coms. It takes us a while to figure out a film this awful can contain stars so saleable and supposedly unassailable.

But there you have it. A romantic- comedy plot written into a project featuring the overrated stars and their most invisible off-screen chemistry, packaged in a plot that seems to have been written on a day when inspiration was at an all-time low for the writers.

The Bounty Hunter begins with Butler cruising in a convertible with Aniston locked in the dickey.

Before we begin to wonder if Butler, who plays a guy appointed to nab people who jump bail, can be called Dickey Tracey (there are multiple puns tucked into that one) the plot jumps the gun in more ways than one as the unbelievably-bizarre situations crowd the couple on the run.

This is Bonnie & Clyde without the biting wit or the acerbic twists. Yes, there is basic sacrcasm in every line. But beyond a point who the hell cares whether this hysterical pair loves or hates each other? Butler and Aniston don't make a great pair.

They just look like two travelers who could do with a wash. Sure enough during the second lap of their fun-run-gone-phut the couple reaches a honeymoon resort run by a giddyheaded couple who sniff around Butler and Aniston and say, something smells like the cesspit.

We can't smell anything. But we know exactly what it feels like to watch a film that really and truly stinks in every department.

Aniston and Butler are given to play characters straight out of a late-night risqué sitcom. Tragically they've no love-making to do on screen.

That might have been more interesting than watching the couple snarl and snipe at each other in canine fashion. The only use they make of their lungs and mouths is to shout abuses expletives and recriminations at one another.

Finally the anything-but-wholesome twosome get what they deserve. One another.

A word on the performances. Aniston plays all her screen parts as extensions of her prolonged tenure on Friends. She's flat and spaced-out in most of the scenes. As for Butler, what is all the fuss about? The actor insists on playing every character as an aggressive modern-day Viking with no respect for the fair sex.

The boor is a bore.