The trailers are big liars. The clips focus on the bar, the crazy atmosphere, the dancing women, fire, and music. The movie, on the other hand, is about an aspiring songwriter by the name of Violet Sanford (Piper Perabo) and her trials and troubles getting her first song produced. The problem is that Violet can't sing her own songs to audition for agents so she can fulfill her lifelong dreams of becoming a songwriter because she has terminal stage fright developed from a childhood association with her dead mother's aborted stage career, the failure of which was the partial fault of her overweight, overprotective, blue-collar, laundry-challenged, single father. Along the way we pick up the obligatory love interest and N'Synch reject Adam Garcia who plays an orphan from Australia who works three jobs and has no aspirations. Oh, and there's this bar called Coyote Ugly that serves as a focal point for the movie but is really incidental to most of it.
We've just explained the entire movie. If this were an intelligent film, there would be the potential for variation or dynamic interactions. Because this is a Hollywood flick, you can be assured that all problems will be neatly resolved. You can figure out the little details yourself as it follows the stereotypical screenplay formulas for love and success stories. You may even be able to write in some surprises because there were none for us in the movie. It's movies like these that support our hypothesis that movies are written using a Mad Libs type formula. Was it important that the heroine lived in the Chinatown part of New York? Was it important that the love interest was from Australia? Should there be four or five dancing women on the bar? Should the father have a crisis due to a heart attack or from a car accident? When should the Fake Crisis happen? When should the Real Crisis happen? It didn't really matter. It was all pretty fake. Even the core problem of the movie - Violet's stage fright - gets beaten deader than the Macarena and sounds very stupid by the end of the movie. To add insult to injury, the denouement is 100% pure Wisconsin cheese that actually reminded us more of a Bad News Bears movie than anything else.
The stuff that we feared the most before seeing the movie was actually pretty good, if slightly unbelievable. The bar not only has women dancing on it but a lot of interesting atmosphere. There are some very funny bar scenes, which probably wouldn't make a whole movie but did save the movie from being completely unbearable. A better movie might have been found dealing with an ensemble cast and their interactions. But it didn't so each of the women that you meet are simply stereotypes, as the trailers truthfully stated, that wear tight clothing and dance but are empowered feminists at the same time. The message here is that you are empowered if you can get men to fork over large amounts of money while pitchers of water are dumped on your leather-clad body.
Still, this movie had a lot of bad movie potential. There were the usual horrible expositions, unbelievable plot devices, and random stupid characters thrown in for color. There's enough stuff to make fun of here to keep your head from exploding. We don't recommend that you see this in the theaters. Save it as a last option for a free rental coupon or wait for it to come to USA.
We give this movie a 5 on the Good Movie Scale and a 6 on the Bad Movie Scale.
Our Drive-In Totals:
0 dead bodies (In a Jerry Bruckheimer film?!)
0 breasts
4 bra shots
2 very questionable U-turns that warped the space-time continuum
$400 worth of men
"Cocktail" rip-offs with juggling bottles
"Pretty Woman" rip-offs with the "fashion coordinator"
"Little Voice" rip-offs with the stage lights going out to cure stage
fright
1 Obligatory "Cheers" reference
Multiple clog dances
Flaming bar
Fish lobbing
Ponytail execution
Cardboard celebrity cameos in middle of love scene
3 Rules of Coyote Conduct
1 Music Soothes the Savage Bar Fight scene (no joking)
1 artificially transplanted hip-hop dancer
1 artificially transplanted fire marshal
3 artificially transplanted hecklers who can't act
3 artificially transplanted police officers
1 classic "guy car"
1 Holy Grail of Comic Books (Amazing Spider-Man 129? Yeah, right.).
A half dozen or so smashed whiskey bottles
Jim, Jack, Johnny Red, Johnny Black, and Jose
A 15 Toll Booth Salute
1 Ubiquitous Plug for Apple Computers
References to Piedmont, North Dakota
Kung Fu
Car Fu
Ice Fu
Hose Fu
Megaphone Fu
Kung Juke
Good Movie Scale: 5 out of 10
Bad Movie Scale: 6 out of 10
