Grade: D
Verdict: Dog-face hideous.
Details: Starring Piper Perabo, Adam Garcia, Maria Bello and John Goodman.
Rated PG-13 for sensuality. 1 hour, 34 minutes.
Rate it: Write your own review
Review: It's a good title. You know, calling a movie Coyote Ugly. Especially
one with five hot, boot-wearing chicks stamping on a wooden bar,
pulling at their tiny, low-cut tops and vests, raking long-nailed
fingers through their sweaty hair while bumping and grinding in tight
leather pants and ultra-minis.
The Coyote Ugly come-on is these five women. There's tough bar
owner Lil (Maria Bello), sugary-sweet Cammie (Izabella Miko),
tie-you-up dominatrix Rachel (Bridget Moynahan), sultry Zoe (Tyra
Banks) and -- the new kid in New York -- vulnerable Jersey (Piper
Perabo).
They splash whiskey across the bar and set it afire. Amid hoots
and catcalls from the clientele crammed into their tiny, dilapidated
bar world, the girls hold torches, swig liquor and spew fireballs like
curvaceous human flamethrowers. They douse each others' T-shirts
with big pitchers of water.
Hello, spring break.
This is high-concept moviemaking from producer Jerry
Bruckheimer, who with and without his late partner, Don Simpson,
has fashioned a long line of loud, rock 'em, moneymaking films
such as Flashdance, Top Gun, Days of Thunder, Con Air and
Armageddon. Nary a one of them contained a molecule of brain
matter.
Coyote Ugly is profoundly stupid, earnestly inept at conveying a
story and hellbent on wallowing in its shallow emotional
manipulations. It'll probably make millions.
With the flimsiest of plots, this movie blares nearly 30 songs
(including Def Leppard's Pour Some Sugar on Me, EMF's You're
Unbelievable, and Kid Rock's Cowboy ). It entices with a single
nude silhouette (this movie only boasts skin, it never really displays
it). As in that other gloriously bad bar movie Cocktail, the liquor
bottles are twirled like six-shooters.
The slapdash story involves a young waif, who, to make ends meet,
takes a job at a New York bar called Coyote Ugly. She's Jersey,
alias Violet Sanford (Perabo), a struggling songwriter fresh from
New Jersey aching for stardom in the big, big city if she can ever
get over stage fright. See, she can't sing when anyone's watching
her.
So she meets this Australian guy (Adam Garcia). She gets to like
him. Maybe even like him. She tells him all about her. He won't say
much about himself. You know how it is.
Pretty soon, we're watching him have anxiety over a comic book.
She's singing her innocuous songs on her apartment rooftop under
a glowing moon.
Suddenly, you're a long way from that rowdy fun-time bar. Now,
you're stuck in this gooey glump of a movie about a guy who won't
talk and a girl who won't shut up. She lets him have it. "It's so easy
being you!" It's the big, bad breakup.
Will they get back together? Will she ever take her singing passion
and make it happen? Can this girl really have it all?
Egad. What a feeling.
— Steve Murray, Cox News Service
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
Coyote Ugly
