938. The Hottie & The Nottie (2008)

Starring: Paris Hilton, Joel David Moore, Christine Lakin

Director: Tom Putnam

Running Time: 91 mins

The Hottie And The Nottie is an American film about a man who tracks down his crush from school in California and, surprisingly, hits it off with her. The only problem is that he can’t start dating her until he finds a suitable match for her ugly best friend.

This is another completely tedious rom-com that fails to make you laugh even once, or let you be remotely interested in the drama that unfortunately becomes the prevailing part of this boring story.

The problem is that this film starts off in a relatively promising way, because it’s effectively the same story as There’s Something About Mary, a grown man finds his high school crush and they begin dating, but the directions that the two films go from there are vastly different, starting mainly with how the comedy goes.

Here, the comedy is pretty much reliant on two things. Firstly, the slew of painfully weak and watered-down jokes written into the script by someone with the sense of humour of the Grim Reaper, and secondly, the running joke of this extremely ugly girl, which wears off very quickly, and, whilst it’s more offensive than funny initially, it quickly becomes a boring part of the story that you only really notice because it’s thrust at you so directly.

What’s worse is that this falls into the traps of so many modern rom-coms. Obviously, the comedy is terrible, but the romance becomes so overly dramatic in the latter stages, and for something with a story as dull and uninteresting as this, there’s never a point where you actually care for any of the characters, leaving the more dramatic parts of the story as tedious as anything.

Finally, this film is also painful to watch when you consider that it’s basically just a vanity project for Paris Hilton, with the whole story basically showing that she’s so much better-looking than everyone else, and whilst her character isn’t necessarily a goddess, the fact that she’s Executive Producer of this film and the person who hogs the camera the most is something that really made me unhappy to think about, so overall, this gets a 2.0.