The worst!

Rating: 2/10 (15 April 2003)

Coyote Ugly was made for boys between the ages of 13 and 16. One of the worst movies of the year. Not impressed with this one by producer Jerry Bruckheimer ("Gone in 60 Seconds," "Armageddon," "Con Air," etc)
Piper Perabo ("The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle") -- a wide-eyed beauty from central casting -- is the movie's generic ingenue, a girl named Violet from small town New Jersey who moves to New York to pursue her dreams of being a songwriter. Of course, even though she grew up just down the turnpike from Manhattan, she's as naive as a farmer's daughter and learns the hard way that peddling your demo tape to snide receptionists at record label offices isn't going to get you anywhere in the Big City.

So instead of becoming an instant music biz success, Violet finds herself working at the meat packing district's wildest road house, Coyote Ugly.

Staffed by 102-lb. sexpots who habitually shake their stuff atop the bar in size two leather pants and tank tops, the joint is packed wall-to-wall every night with hooting, drooling patrons that the girls tease like pole-dancers to coax drinks into them and money out of them.
Written in Screenwriting 101 style, packed with every New York City cliché in the book (her dank, dingy flat is broken into her first week in town), and overflowing with young girls in wonderbras while dancing, the first half of "Coyote Ugly" plays like it was penned by a 13-year-old boy who just discovered masturbation. For the second half, the script must have been handed off to a 13-year-old girl who thinks Britney Spears is the greatest musical talent the world has ever known, because the rest of the movie is launched by a "Face it dad, I'm not your little girl anymore" speech and built around Violet overcoming stage fright and chasing her dream of selling bubble-gum pop songs - aided, of course, by the charming encouragement of a handsome boy (Australian actor Adam Garcia) who just knows she can do it!

And yes, Violet sings. A lot. It's an endless source of unintentional comedy because when she's slinking across the bar at Coyote Ugly, singing along to the jukebox (each Coyote girl has a gimmick, that's hers), Perabo warbles in her own, weak and gritty voice. But when belting out one of the acoustic Lilith Faire-lite ditties she hopes to sell some day, suddenly she's a honey-voiced songbird, courtesy of audio looping by jailbait country music star LeAnn Rimes (who has a cameo in the finale).
Another hearty laugh stems from the fact that "Coyote Ugly" takes place in a picturesquely gritty, fantasy version of NYC in which a 21-year-old cutie pie bartender can walk down an alley at 4 a.m. in a 15-inch skirt and knee-highs, counting her tips without a care in the world.

On the respectability front, the picture's one saving grace is John Goodman, who is blue collar perfection as Violet's modest, toll-collector pop.

But even though "Coyote Ugly" is tedious, obvious and badly staged, it does have an infectious spirit. That's hardly enough to save this one aimed at the can't-wait-to-be-21 crowd.