In an ideal world – you know the one, in a galaxy far, far, away – this would have been the Boba Fett story. But it’s not. Instead it’s a Hollywood studio’s stab at creating some movie magic by throwing everyone’s least favourite ‘friend’ Jennifer Aniston into the bulky arms of 300 star Gerard Butler, for what they would hope would be a winning rom-com combo.

Nicole (Aniston) is a reporter for a newspaper no less. She’s following up a lead on a juicy story; but when her informant goes missing, her story gets that little bit bigger. So much so that she misses her court appearance over a driving offense she committed. The court takes her non appearance as a break of her bail agreement, which means that she’s effectively on the lamb.

This means she appears on the radar of Milo Boyd (Butler) who is a bounty hunter; he gets paid to bring in those who have broken bail. The crazy thing is Boyd knows Nicole. Actually, they used to be quite friendly; friendly to the point where they were actually married, to one another. Small world huh?

But things didn’t work out. They broke up. Got divorced. So Boyd relishes the idea of hunting his ex-wife down and bringing her to justice. It’s kind of like his warped version of closure. The problem is, he doesn’t realise how much danger she’s really in – until he’s in it too with her.

That's right, I'm a cop in casual clothing. It's all the rage.

There was a time when all that romantic comedy really had to achieve was chemistry between its two amorous leads. Nothing beats a little sizzle on the screen. However, When Harry Met Sally turned out to be a game changer when it was released as it proved that the genre could benefit from being incredibly funny and sharply scripted. To that end, it is the benchmark for all modern rom-coms.

And therein lies the problem. Very few films can reach such dizzy heights. With audience supposedly being more sophisticated (which is difficult to believe when people turn up to see the big screen outing of The A-Team and genuinely expect to be entertained), films these days can’t simply rely on on-screen chemistry. They need more than that, and The Bounty Hunter just doesn’t have it.

Sure Aniston and Butler give it a fair old crack of the whip, making the best of an average script and an awful premise for a story. But they can only carry the film so far. Sadly, neither of them have the Herculean strength to make it through all 110 minutes.

It doesn’t help that the thriller element of the script is greatly at odds with both rom and com. If any evidence was needed that a Hart to Hart reboot would be a bad idea, then this is it. In fact the only thing stopping this from being exactly that is dear old Max saying ‘and when they met, it was moider!’

None of this should come as any surprise however, particularly when you take on board the film’s weak pedigree: its writer has previously written nothing of any worth, and its director Andy Tennant has produced rather lame ducks such as Fools Rush In, Ever After, Sweet Home Alabama and Hitch.

Someone in tinsel town clearly wants Butler to be the new romantic lead; but if you look at the evidence to date – PS I Love You (2007), The Ugly Truth (2009) and now this – audiences really aren’t feeling the love.

And surely it won’t be long now before Aniston heads back to TV where she really belongs; because let’s face it, that’s where all her real Friends are.

The fact of the matter is, The Bounty Hunter can only really be described as a semi-rom-com; and let’s face it, no-one is ever going to be satisfied with a semi.