Coyote Ugly

Herald rating: * *

Cast: Piper Perabo, John Goodman, Adam Garcia, Maria Bello, Tyra Banks, Melanie Lynskey

Director: David McNally

Rating: PG (sexual references)

Running time: 101 minutes

Screening: Village, Hoyts cinemas from Thursday

Review: Russell Baillie

There's something oddly disappointing about Coyote Ugly. It's not that the Jerry Bruckheimer-produced flick isn't up to his usual standards - which are less an aesthetic, more a mission statement: bigger, louder, dumber, flashier, trashier.

No, it's that a movie about women who look like models serving drinks in between dancing on the bartop of a nouveau redneck New York pub is actually quite, er, sweet. Cute, even. Tasteful too.

Well, some of us don't go to see movies about women who look like models serving drinks in between dancing on the bartop of a nouveau redneck New York pub for sweet, nor cute, and especially not tasteful.

Movies about women who etc, etc ... shouldn't, by rights, be life-affirming tales about following your dreams and female empowerment. Rather, they exist to be the cinematic equivalent to your barber's magazine pile, set to music.

That's unless, of course, you are quite below the drinking age and your girls' nights out involve people who are, by definition, girls. For you, this is a fine movie. Especially as its script neatly distils the views of the great feminist thinkers of our age: Baby, Posh, Sporty, Scary and yes, Britney.

My notes don't recall any cast members saying, "You go girl." But you can almost bet in one non-English-speaking part of the world where the term "coyote ugly" just won't translate - "Da, two tickets for Dances with Wolf Faces" - "You Go Girl" might as well be its name.

The real problem with Coyote Ugly is not that it's terrible and exploitative - it's that it is not terrible and exploitative enough.

From the shorts, we expected trash, we get Flashdance-goes-Alanis with its story of mild-mannered but meaningful singer-songwriter Violet (Perabo), whose first bite of the Big Apple gets her a job as a girl in the bar which bears the film's name.

There, the staff have stroppy attitudes pouring out their exposed navels, and the mainly male clientele behave raucously, within certain limits. Should someone start a fight, there's always the threat that Violet will sing karaoke at them, which in turn cures her stage-fright and leads to the Big Happy Ending.

Along the way there's the young Aussie chap (Garcia) to provide inspiration for Violet's dear-diary songs, her widowed father (Goodman making a fine fist of things), and her best friend from back home in New Jersey (our own Lynskey who does that no-small-parts-just-small-movies thing that Joan Cusack does with her supporting characters).

But that's it for characters.

Most everybody else is a cut-out, and as the fast-edit bartop dance sequences show, those quick-hoofing cowboy boots belong to someone other than the "actors" playing the staff.

Which, anatomically speaking, makes it one weird movie - alive from the knees down, dead from the neck up and quite numb in-between.