A sexually bashful bump-and-grind...

Rating: 5/10 (26 November 2010)

Bar-waitress from Iowa ditches the sticks with a bus ticket to Hollywood, where she seeks employment as a singer; she finds an extravagant strip club on the Strip--where nobody strips!--and eventually worms her way into a dancing audition. Steve Antin wrote and directed this modern-day razzle-dazzle musical fantasy, apparently after overdosing on a double feature of "Cabaret" and "A Star Is Born". The film apes Fosse's "Cabaret" openly and unashamedly (not that fans of star Christina Aguilera would notice), even throwing in a dance routine to the "Cabaret" instrumental "Sitting Pretty". In fact, Antin is so wrapped up in his movie homages (i.e., stealing bits and pieces from various films, including "Midnight Cowboy" for the first few minutes) that he forgets to make sense out of the one he's directing. Cher runs the Burlesque club, and performs whenever she feels like it, but is in debt to the bank and may have close the joint down (a subplot right out of a 1940s Betty Hutton picture); in the mean time, Aguilera, who's been hiding her singing light under a bushel, finally belts out a smoky number and brings down the house--but will it be enough to get the hot-spot out of hock? Perhaps using less electricity in the stage numbers would curb their Edison bill? There's a musclebound bartender who has eyes for Christina (he wears eyeliner and she initially thinks he's gay, the only time that word is mentioned), while Stanley Tucci flits about like Peter Pan playing Cher's assistant (his character is gay, but Antin is as bashful of that as is he about the girls' stage routines). There's no connection between "Burlesque" and reality; it's all smoke-and-mirrors piffle. Cher doesn't want to sell the club, nobody can offer her enough money to give up the club, yet she won't listen to anyone's suggestions and she doesn't want to change the format. The welfare of her dancers barely comes into the equation--they don't even seem aware of the club's money troubles. The generic boy-girl romance between bartender/songwriter and singer/dancer is used as a fringe element, and has so little relevance to the central action that it becomes a chore to get through (it has been added simply to extend Aguilera's profile). Throughout, we get bitchy backstage banter and Vegas-styled musical numbers without anything concrete to support the issues of loyalty the script timidly raises. "Burlesque" has a chronic case of "Peter Pan"-itis...it refuses to allow grown-up actors the chance to act grown-up on the screen. ** from ****