Miss Congeniality

Herald rating: * * *

Cast: Sandra Bullock, Benjamin Bratt, Michael Caine

Director: Donald Petrie

Rating: M

Running time: 110 minutes

Screening: Village, Hoyts and Berkley cinemas

Review: Tim Watkin

After what might be politely called limited success in some more serious roles, this easy-going comedy gets Sandra Bullock's career back on track with a bullet. Literally.

She's FBI agent Gracie Hart; snort-laughing, beer-swilling, stained T-shirt, one-of-the-guys kind of girl. The job is her life.

But she's in trouble with her boss after erring on a Russian mafia sting. That is until the agency learns that an infamous psychopath, the Citizen, is targeting the Miss United States beauty pageant for his next hit.

Equal opportunities employer that it is, the FBI has a pretty small pool of pretty young agents.

No one thinks of Gracie at first - she's Eliza Doolittle before Professor Higgins starts his work, Wonder Woman before she whips her glasses off and lets out her hair - but soon she's being taught how to walk, talk and long for world peace.

With all this preening, there's not much time for action or tension. Two brief cutaways to a mysterious figure being mysterious doesn't cut it, so the movie has to rely on humour and onBullock. And when it does, it does pretty well.

Bullock's star status has a lot to do with her charm and her winning smile, so the beauty pageant setting gets her doing what she's good at.

She carries the film - believable and endearing as both slob and siren. And the limp Benjamin Bratt aside, the stylish supporting cast of Candice Bergen, Michael Caine and William Shatner shine.

At times they've got good material to work with. There are a few really funny scenes: mixing the FBI files and the Dress Up Sally website, teaching self-defence live from the pageant, and a finale the way you always thought beauty pageants deserved to end.

Beauty pageants, or "scholarship programmes" as organiser Kathy Morningside calls them, are an easy target, yet for some reason everyone involved in this film holds their fire and cops out.

They satirise the whole pageant environment and give Bullock a passing, "it's as if feminism never happened" comment, but in the end opt for the fake sincerity of the contestants to justify these gawkfests.

Considering that the producers are surely counting on the parade of beauties to get guys to see this film with their girlfriends, that might get them off charges of hypocrisy. But having Hart say she feels "liberated" by her pageant experience? Good grief.

There's no redeeming message here. The writer and director seem blind to the fact that Grace works with sexist pigs who, while insisting she's just one of the guys, make her go and get the coffee. She gets the guy at the end, only because he now knows she can look gorgeous.

But if you're prepared to dumb-down to beauty contestant level, this is Hollywood doing what it does best: humour, chutzpah and hooters, they might say in L.A. It's one of the best Saturday night movies of the summer, and while you won't remember it next summer, you will laugh when you recall some of the scenes with your mates after the movie.