Phony

Rating: 1/10 (27 December 2001)

Renee Zellweger's ludicrous British accent is only one of the outrages perpetrated in Sharon Maguire's film of the Helen Fielding bestseller about the life and loves of a thirty-something single woman. This is a film that could set the feminist cause back thirty years with its shamelessly aggressive belief that women have careers only to make themselves more available to men and that life isn't worth living if Mr. Right doesn't come along. Zellweger spends the entire film trying to convince us she's got the accent down but she's only a caricature--and a blank one at that. Maguire, meanwhile, spends just as much effort trying to convince us that a natural beauty like Zellweger is fat and plain--it's a sham (much like Janeane Garafolo is in `The Truth About Cats & Dogs'). The rest of the cast is uninspired; even the dependable Hugh Grant, trying to play against type as a cad, barely registers a pulse and Colin Firth, as Mr. Right, is curiously unlikable. The script (by Fielding and two other-male-writers) is shallow and tedious.