Tolerable showbiz hokum

Rating: 8/10 (23 December 2010)

Small town girl Christina Aguilera goes to the big city where she ends up waitressing at Cher's Burlesque club. Various sub-plots ensue: Aguilera gets a chance to go on stage and dance, and then sing; a vindictive rival is beset with jealousy at her sudden success; Cher is faced with financial difficulties and has to find a way not to lose the club; romantic issues arise; other bits and pieces.
My expectation was that this was going to be trashy (and, in truth, it features its fair share of cliché situations and stock characters), and I don't care for Aguilera's over-ornamented style of singing.
So I was most surprised to discover that I enjoyed this enormously. As a first starring vehicle for Aguilera it must be marked a success: her particular brand of girl next door wholesomeness, cross-pollinated with sexual trashiness, translates well to the screen, and she sure has got a powerful set of pipes, which is undoubtedly due to her big lungs. The musical numbers show some variety and are all entertaining (though no wonder the club is having financial difficulty given the amount it must be spending on staging its shows) The biggest problem is that there is no real jeopardy here - everybody is actually quite nice, and all problems get resolved with the minimum of trouble, so the level of dramatic tension is never very high. Although, in some ways, it's quite nice to have a movie where you like the characters and the things which happen to them are sometimes a bit worrying but never really horrible.
And there is a lovely relationship between Cher's and Stanley Tucci's characters.