Review of Legally Blonde

Introduction

Elle Woods (Reece Witherspoon), a spoiled Californian mall-bunny with a good-natured mane of golden locks, is the most popular girl in school. However, her arrogant beau (a distinctly non-blonde Matthew Davis) fancies more substantial foil, and ditches Elle for the intellectual status of Harvard Law. Elle, driven by gormless enthusiasm if not a solid grounding in common-sense, follows him there only to be greeted with mutual hostility by the snobbish students and faculty (particularly Davis’ new fiancée Selma Blair, also non-blonde: An ice-queen who soon thaws under Elle’s charms). Against all odds, Elle soon finds out who her true friends are, and with the help of a convenient murder-case, gets to prove her new found legal wits as well; in a case which, helpfully, hinges on issues of hair-care and the sparse fashion knowledge of heterosexual males.

Video

Pretty seamless, it’s a colourful and vibrant looking film (beneath the quaint conservative aesthetic) and the transfer is flawless in presenting it.

Audio

There’s some good use of the 5.1 surround track, but, given that this film is a gag-driven comedy, it is mainly used for ambience. Still, the dialogue and annoying teeny-bopper music is clear and clean.

Features

Some nice extras here: there’s a cute commentary from Witherspoon, director Robert Luketic and producer Marc Platt, that mainly centres on hairstyles and wardrobe. A similarly appropriate obsession with surface values dominates the featurette: ‘The Hair That Ate Hollywood’, and we get the film’s bouncy trailer. Less interesting are the corralled deleted scenes, which fail to evoke any interest or laughter, and a cynically tacked-on music video complete with advertising promo spot for the soundtrack. It redeems itself with a ‘Pop-Up Video’ style trivia track which reveals lots of frivolous, barely relevant bits of mindless data while your eyes adjust to Mrs. Witherspoon’s insane number of costume changes.

Conclusion

Call it ‘Pop-Up Movie’: lots of cute little one-liners, neatly cropped by ’10 Things I Hate About You’ scribes Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith; “lovable” characters and zippy comedy set-pieces, but a banal narrative spine that doesn’t make the best use of the film’s strongest elements. Predictably, Witherspoon anchors the unbalanced script in her personable warmth and comedic intelligence, confirming her status as one of Hollywood’s most talented young actresses.

There are plenty of humorous moments, and at least five very funny gags, but the film’s seemingly superfluous storyline makes demands the script cannot fulfill, so it resorts to silly subplots and boring characters hanging around the periphery: Elle’s shaved lapdog is doused in numerous humiliating outfits for monotonous comedic effect; an ugly duckling manicurist and dopey-geek colleague provide cretinous examples of Elle’s boastful decency. If the ultimate triumph of Elle’s mindless optimism and blind humanism masquerading as a commitment to ‘substance’ is mildly offensive, this is a serviceable vehicle sure to complement Witherspoon’s justifiable rise; but it never really rises above the mediocrity into which it seems to have so willingly cast itself.