Working-class girl from Jersey with songwriting ambitions conquers stage fright by getting up atop an all-night bar in NY and shaking it around for the lascivious insomniacs.
An exhibitionist plot off the Jerry Bruckheimer stock-room shelves, Coyote Ugly aims to do for Piper Perabo (a Julia Roberts challenger in the tooth market) what a white suit and disco did for some other guy I can't quite place at the moment.
Director David McNally made beer ads before he was entrusted with flesh: he treats human beings as containers, just the same.
Coyote Ugly, the name of the girlsrun nite hole, is all fizz but no pop: it's a drugs-free zone, too, which tells us what sort of fairy tale we're in, and the girl-power it stands for doesn't seem much different from the older trade that girls use to screw money out of guys. Adam Garcia, a pert Australian import, plays Perabo's squeeze and does a half-Monty on the counter-top when she puts him up for auction to pay her debts. It looks at one moment that man-mountain John Goodman, as her abrasive dad, will follow suit, but he doesn't even do a half-moon. At least we're spared that, thanks to the Certificate 12, which exactly matches the target audience's IQ level.
Coyote Ugly
Cert: 12A
