The Bounty Hunter – Movie Review

The Bounty Hunter – Movie Review

By: Stacey Tuttle

When most movies are about new relationships forming, or old relationships busting up, it is always refreshing to find a movie about people putting relationships back together.  In The Bounty Hunter, circumstances essentially throw a divorced couple back together.  As they are forced to spend a quantity of time together, they naturally end up rethinking a few things that broke them apart.  Their quantity of time gradually becomes more quality time.  And in the end, they restore their marriage.

There are a couple of little relationship jewels that can be collected from this movie.  First off, it often takes forced time together and alone to begin to work on the core issues in a relationship.  It is naïve to think that issues will just work themselves out throughout the casual course and business of life –time together requires both quantity and quality to become healing.  This is why so many people find help, healing and even restoration in marriage retreats.  It forces them to spend a large chunk of time together, relatively uninterrupted by the normal concerns of life (kids, chores, etc.), and encourages (if not forces) quality, intentional conversation and activity together.

Second, a lot of healing can be found when even one person begins to confess their guilt.  At one point in the movie, over dinner, Milo and Nicole begin to talk about what goes wrong in relationships.  One of them (I think Nicole) asks, “Why can’t people just take responsibility for their [actions] in a relationship and move on?”  Milo responds, “Maybe people will think admission of guilt is weakness?”  Nicole corrects him, “No, [it’s a sign of] maturity.”  I have to confess, I wasn’t expecting to receive any good relationship advice from The Bounty Hunter, but this is spot on.  Confessing your guilt is hard – not only because it feels like a sign of weakness, but also because it requires you to simply admit (to others and to yourself) that you are guilty.  We think (or at least, I should confess that sometimes I think) if we don’t confess it, maybe we aren’t.  Maybe no one will know we are guilty if we don’t ever admit it.  Who are we fooling?!  Let’s be honest – the other person usually already knows we are wrong.  In regards to bringing it out in the open, our confession rarely surprises anyone else with what we have done wrong, but it does acknowledge that we know it too.  Beyond that, it also shows that we care more about the fact that we hurt the other person than that we have to hurt our ego to confessing it.  Nicole is right, confessing our guilt is a sign of maturity.  She is also largely right, that if people would just take responsibility for their actions, their relationships could move on. 

Questions for Discussion:

• Do you need more quality time, more quantity time or more of both in your key relationships?
• How do you respond to others who are willing to confess their faults and offenses?  Does it strengthen your relationship with them or weaken it?
• How do you respond when you have wronged someone else?  Do you ignore it and hope it will go away, blame them for what they did wrong (maybe you even think if they hadn’t wronged you, you wouldn’t have wronged them – so it’s really all their fault anyway), confess your wrongs in true repentance for having hurt them?
• Do you see confession as a weakness or a sign of maturity?
• Are there people in your life to whom you need to confess?  Are there broken relationships you need to restore?