My Super Ex-Girlfriend review

Puppy-eyed stares, pillow talk, all-night shag-a-thons... ain’t love grand? Call us cynical, but Total Film knows that for every Great Love there’s a Bad Break-Up where your other half swaps your dinner for dog food. Yet, even in our roster of unhinged exes, no one can match Uma Thurman’s G-Girl. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s a whacked-out Wonder Woman hungry for revenge. Move over, Lorena Bobbitt...

A high-concept genre-blender, My Super Ex-Girlfriend seems like such a forehead-slappingly obvious idea in retrospect. Rewiring the “boy meets girl, boy loses girl” formula which has been doing the rounds since Adam first played hide-the-serpent with Eve, Ivan Ghostbusters Reitman’s relationship flick mixes chalk’n’cheese and whips up a tasty little morsel: a super-funny rom-com with a cape. Forget last year’s embarrassing Sky High (that was easy, wasn’t it?), My Super Ex-Girlfriend knows there’s more to supergags than putting Spandex underpants on your head.

Most of the fun is in the fury. Pissed off at being dumped faster than a hot cowpat, G-Girl gets mad and even – using her superpowers to emasculating effect. She launches Matt’s car into orbit, bunny-boils his pet goldfish with heat vision and chucks a thrashing, gnashing great white CG shark into his bed in a balls-out scene that’ll make you wish cinemas had a rewind button.

Self-effacing leading man Wilson takes it all on his chinless chin, backed up by some buffed-up gems from Simpsons writer Don Payne. “It’s not one of those Crying Game things, is it?” squirms Matt, when Jenny tells him she has a secret to confess, adding plaintively, “I mean, I’m from Denver...”

Meanwhile, Thurman proves she really is the first lady of cinematic vengeance – she’s scarily convincing as headcase superheroine G-Girl. Effortlessly upstaging both stars, though, is Matt’s shamelessly horny mate Vaughn (Rainn Wilson), who gets a full quota of quotable lines (“She looks like a cheerleader from Spank Me University!”).

With the details sewn up, it’s the bigger picture that sometimes falters: Eddie Izzard’s megavillain and a Smallville-style high-school flashback seem redundant, while Anna Faris (as G-Girl’s rival) struggles to make any impact in Thurman’s shadow – at least until... no, we won’t spoil it.

A hurried ending suggests the CGI broke the bank long before the final shot, but ultimately it’s not the superheroics that matter in this movie. A sparky comedy about the special kind of hell relationships can sometimes fall into, My Super Ex-Girlfriend teaches us many things about the sex war, not least of all: if you ever meet your own supergirl, never, ever, let her get on top in the sack. All we can say is, “Ouch.”