Romantic Comedy Leading Men

When we think of the traditional leading man, we may think of some dashing, square-jawed type. But cast an eye over the romantic comedies of recent years and guess what? He isn't there.

Good-looking male leads have been replaced with ungainly schlebs you'd cross the street to avoid let alone end up in bed with. The rot set in with the Wedding Crashers, which starred Luke Wilson and Vince Vaughan as two irrepressible child-men quagmired in arrested development. Wilson and Vaughan may both be easy on the eye, but as potential mates, their characters left an awful lot to be desired. The movie, however, did phenomenally well at the box office - and marked the beginning of the trend for cynical, male-oriented romantic comedies.

Close on the heels of Wedding Crashers came My Super Ex-Girlfriend, starring another Wilson, this time Luke's brother Owen, which sought to capitalise on the success of movies such as SpiderMan and X-Men. Here we were asked to believe that the beautiful Uma Thurman, a flying Amazon with a killer wardrobe, would not only waste her time with a charmless ordinary schmo, she'd completely lose the plot when he didn't reciprocate her love.

In The Holiday, meanwhile, Kate Winslet should have been nominated for an Oscar for pretending to fall for the Hobbit-like Jack Black. But this rather pernicious trend reached a zenith in 2007 with Judd Apatow's Knocked Up starring Katherine Heigel and Seth Rogen. In this film, the message is clear: guys, no matter how big a slob you are and no matter how bad your habits, there's always a beautiful woman dumb enough or drunk enough to sleep with you.

"The problem," says Bill Mernit, the author of Writing the Romantic Comedy, "is that too often the people that attempt making romantic comedies now don't really understand what it is they're doing. So they go for the superficial gimmick or gag. The best romantic comedies tend to be about something and they're quite meaningful. It gets down to the basic stuff about being human."