Legally Blonde

Californian sorority queen Elle Woods (Witherspoon) dreams of the day she'll marry her ambitious boyfriend Warner. Unfortunately, he won't play ball. Just off to Harvard Law School, he dumps her, saying: 'If I'm going to be President, I need a Jacqueline Kennedy, not a Marilyn Monroe.' Undeterred, Elle enrols alongside him and sets out to prove she can be both. The film likewise attempts to give two for one. Boasting conscience, cleavage and bags of money, Elle is Cher from Clueless by way of Erin Brockovich. She pulls off the double act with aplomb; the film as a whole, however, is less assured. The writers do best when the jokes revolve around school; the acid-tongued law professors are well observed, so too the competitive, politicised students. But sophistication deserts them when they stray into the real world, whether the beauty parlour or the courts themselves. Elle's ultimate girl-power test is to defend a fitness queen on a murder charge, and here her 'spontaneous' wisdom begins to sound as post-feminist as TV's Are You Being Served?