Tugging on Supergirl's cape

Some women aspire to the life, or at least the attitude, of the superheroine; I always sorta hoped that one might someday look my way, if only to cancel out my own distressing deficiency of super-ness and possibly offset some of the numbers on the wrong side of the graph. I need hardly point out that it didn't happen, and won't.

Besides, those who are Super, according to legend, aren't supposed to have issues. Stan Lee started the process of demythologizing them; The Incredibles should have finished it off. But just to hammer home the point, Ivan Reitman brings us My Super Ex-Girlfriend, a tale of woe in which an ordinary shlub (Luke Wilson) finds delight, and then despair, with a woman (Uma Thurman) who can melt him with her eyes — literally.

The problems start long before he's clued in about all that Super business: she's neurotic, she's jealous, and she's suspicious, and he decides that he'd best break it off, before she breaks it off for him, so to speak. I might have bought this story if these characters had had any actual chemistry, but I can spot a "no one else will have us, so why not?" setup a mile away, and everything unfolds within the expected bounds of predictability. There are some good lines, and Wanda Sykes is amusing as a bureaucrat constantly watching for signs of sexual harassment, but you can always see the wheels turning behind the scenes.

Too bad, too, since I could definitely use a fantasy figure like Uma's G-Girl; okay, she's insane, but probably no more so than I.

Posted at 5:15 PM to Almost Yogurt