The ugliest truth: 24 romantic-comedy characters who don’t deserve love

1. Renée Zellweger, Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001)
As romantic comedies come to lean more and more on the twin beams of predictable formula (obnoxious people meet each other, hate each other, then come to appreciate each other) and ridiculous gimmicks (as said people are kept apart by outsized misunderstandings and contrivance), it’s apparently becoming necessary for each new rom-com to distinguish itself by making its characters progressively broader and more cartoony. Which tends to leave audiences without much stake in the proceedings as they wait for the bad behavior of some shrill, irritating caricature to be rewarded with ultimate happiness. Case in point: Renée Zellweger as the title character in Bridget Jones’s Diary, the story of a crude, foul-mouthed, dim-witted, judgmental, childishly petty girl-woman who manages to win the love of multiple men even though she pretty much lives to write horrible things about them in her titular diary. This is a lady who saddles the people around her with mental epithets like “prematurely middle-aged prick” and “fat-ass old bag”; even the man who loves her has to admit “You tend to let whatever’s in your head come out of your mouth without much consideration of the consequences.” Which is an acute problem, since she’s mostly thinking things like “Jesus fuck, my ass is as big as Brazil, but I need a shag anyway.”
2. Meg Ryan, Serious Moonlight (2009)
As the jilted wife being left by her husband (Timothy Hutton) for a younger lover, Meg Ryan inhabits a traditionally sympathetic role in Serious Moonlight—in fact, its entire premise hinges on the idea that audiences will find her attempts to get him back, if not relatable, then at least somewhat charming in their out-there doggedness. Trouble is, Ryan’s character starts off merely cold and unlikeable, then quickly turns downright psychopathic. Confronted with her husband’s request for a divorce, she responds by knocking him unconscious, duct-taping him to a toilet, and refusing to let him go until he admits he still loves her. Ryan even goes so far as to explicitly mention that she’s relying on Stockholm syndrome to win Hutton over. Failing that, she’ll have to fall back on forcing him to look at old photos of the way things used to be and ladling on the guilt, even as she freely admits that her own desire to hang onto him has less to do with love than her refusal to accept being lonely. Eventually, her actions put herself and her husband in extreme danger: A burglar breaks into their home, savagely beats Hutton, and repeatedly threatens to rape Ryan, all of which terrifies Hutton into taking her back. If the gender roles were reversed, that scenario would verge uncomfortably close to torture-porn. And the last-minute revelation that [spoiler alert!] Ryan likely planned the break-in all along only confirms she’s manipulative to a chillingly Machiavellian degree.
3. Jada Pinkett, Woo (1998)
The “straitlaced guy has his world turned upside down by one crazy night with an extroverted woman” scenario (as seen in Something Wild, Blind Date, etc.) is a common dude fantasy, but the fantasy requires that said extrovert has something going on besides the craziness—you know, to make up for all the alcoholism and psycho ex-boyfriends. But in Woo, behind Jada Pinkett’s revealing, Tex Avery-worthy outfits and attention-craving manic-depressive fits beats the heart of a stone-cold bitch. Naturally, Woo attempts to paint her selfish behavior as empowered—she can insult her meek, hesitant blind date (Tommy Davidson) because she’s all that, you see, and if she gets both of them thrown out of a restaurant by causing thousands of dollars worth of damage, all because she doesn’t like her table, well, that’s just the rollercoaster experience of being with a woman who speaks her mind! But her free spirit isn’t grounded in some rejection of societal conformity; she’s just a spoiled brat who’s used to men falling all over themselves to do her bidding. And still, we’re asked to care that she has yet to find the poor, unsuspecting man of her dreams. When Woo’s ex-boyfriend assaults Davidson in a nightclub, and he then emerges to find his car has been stolen, Pinkett doubles over with laughter, prompting Davidson to yell, “Maybe we could be having a good time, if you could control your psychotic mood swings!” Maybe, but why bother? There are plenty of other fish in the proverbial sea, and some of them are psycho in a fun way.
4. Jesse Bradford, I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell (2009)
Who would have thought that the Tucker Max movie would turn out to be such a conventional romantic comedy? In spite of the shit-spraying, midget-fucking antics that Max’s onscreen avatar gets up to, I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell is more dully predictable romance than sex farce. Most of its action focuses on one of Max’s buddies running around getting into antic trouble before his wedding, while the other, jilted misogynist Jesse Bradford, meets and is redeemed by a brilliant stripper with a heart of gold, a cute kid, and killer videogame skills. From the start, this total stranger is oddly eager to take Bradford into her home and help him deal with his vast emotional issues and rediscover love. Problem is, he’s never a remotely appealing character, let alone someone who seems interested in or worthy of redemption. This is a guy who approaches a woman at a bar, then—when she unwittingly and without malice does something that reminds him of his cheating ex—snaps “Get away from me, or I’m going to carve another fuckhole in your torso.” He’s a bristling ball of toxic quips and unsettling rants. He even comes along on his best friend’s bachelor-party road trip just to sit sullenly and snarl invective at the sluts, cunts, whores, and bitches of the world, who dare to share his air. The movie itself doesn’t have a much better attitude toward women, given that it so readily supplies him with a beautiful woman who has nothing better to do than drop everything and devote herself to absorbing all his bile.
5. Meg Ryan, Sleepless In Seattle (1993)
Romantic comedies often depend on telling audiences what they wish was true. Case in point: in Sleepless In Seattle, the seemingly happy engaged Meg Ryan hears Tom Hanks talking on the radio, falls in love with his voice, and spends the rest of the movie re-arranging her life to find him. In the real world, these would be the mentally unbalanced actions of a disturbed, desperate person, a quixotic quest for a relationship that couldn’t possibly live up to expectations. While Seattle pays some lip service to Ryan’s strange behavior, she’s ultimately rewarded for her “courage” with the most ideal meet-cute imaginable. Ryan’s delusions already indicate a person who could use some serious psychotherapy, but to make matters worse, she breaks the heart of her fiancée, a boring-but-nice Bill Pullman. There’s nothing wrong with ending an unhappy or unfulfilling relationship, but that Ryan was willing to let it go this far—and that she covers her escape under a quest for some illusory romantic ideal—means she’s destructive to others as well as naïve, short-sighted, and selfish. Hanks would be better off losing her number, although it’s doubtful that’d stop her for long.
6. Jack Nicholson, As Good As It Gets (1997)
“Why can’t I just have a normal boyfriend?” Helen Hunt asks near the end of As Good As It Gets. The line is played largely for laughs, but it also serves as a helpful audience reminder that Jack Nicholson, the film’s misanthropic, bigoted, obsessive-compulsive leading man, is supposed to be falling in love. Nicholson plays a romance novelist who divides his time between washing his hands and figuring out the worst possible thing to say to anyone he comes in contact with. He’s a jerk—and for some reason, that makes him a suitable love interest for the decades-younger Helen Hunt. Nicholson is decently charming, and his character is clearly making steps toward self-improvement by the movie’s end, but “someone who’s slightly less of a creep than he used to be” isn’t really anyone’s idea of a dream match. As Good As It Gets works as a character comedy-drama, but the romantic tension between Hunt and Nicholson never gets past the dictated-by-script phase, partly because Nicholson looks like a human-Sleestak hybrid, and partly because his newfound decency doesn’t make up for a life’s worth of vicious hostility.
7. Nia Vardalos, I Hate Valentine’s Day (2009)
The public embraced Nia Vardalos as a gawky ugly ducking among a flock of romantic-comedy swans in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, but 2009’s bizarrely misguided I Hate Valentine’s Day—which Vardalos not so coincidentally also wrote and directed—narcissistically casts her as a romance-crazed yet commitment-shy lunatic so irresistible that men are willing to submit to a stringent series of ground rules just to be able to spend five magical dates with her. (She has the protocol for each night mapped out as meticulously as a military campaign.) That might make sense if Scarlett Johansson were the one laying down the law for prospective suitors, instead of a mildly attractive, crazy-eyed 45-year-old. Instead, Valentine’s Day plays like a deranged vanity project, one deluded middle-aged woman’s heavy-breathing valentine to her inflated sense of her attractiveness.
8. Jennifer Garner, The Invention Of Lying (2009)
Jennifer Garner spends so much time obsessing about passing down genes for a litter of thin, athletic, non-pug-nosed supermen in Ricky Gervais’ The Invention Of Lying that audiences could be forgiven for mistaking her for the head of the Eugenics Society. Granted, the film takes place in an alternate universe where everyone blurts out the first thing that comes to mind and lying is an utterly foreign concept, yet even in this harsh realm devoid of white lies and pleasant evasions, the blunt, cruel Garner stands out for being egregiously superficial and obsessed with appearances. Even Gervais’ self-deprecating sad-sack deserves much better.
9. Aaron Stanford, Tadpole (2002)
In the dreadful romantic comedy Tadpole, Aaron Stanford plays a foppish 15-year-old dandy whose penchant for quoting Voltaire renders him irresistible to sexy women his own age. Ah, but Stanford’s pretentious, self-aggrandizing boob thinks he’s on a higher evolutionary plane than everyone else in his age group and species, so he pines for his stepmother, the only woman capable of appreciating the wit of his various bon mots. In reality, a precious poindexter like Stanford deserves a lifetime of swirlies and after-school beatdowns, not true love or the older woman of his dreams.