Hollywood at its worst (big, big spoilers!)

Rating: Null/10 (5 October 2001)

The Don Simpson/Jerry Bruckheimer partnership, which had spawned such corkers as Crimson Tide and The Rock and such crap as Top Gun and Days of Thunder, was disrupted somewhat by the untimely death of Simpson in 1996. But aside from the company logo, nothing has changed on-screen since then. If proof of their soulless, mass-production technique was needed, this is surely it; with one half of the team dead, the artistic content hasn't changed in the slightest!
Coyote Ugly, though a Bruckheimer solo project, has the worst features of the brainless 80s fantasies that were the team's trademark. It is a film so banal, so puerile and so immature, that it could have been written by its teenage target audience. Only a 13-year-old could be convinced by its glossy tale of hardship, only a 13-year-old could be surprised by its ending, or interested in anything that comes before it.
The constantly pouting Piper Perabo plays Violet Sanford, a small-town gal who wants to make it in New York as a musician. Her dad doesn't want her to go because it's a scary place, but she moves anyway and finds success isn't as easy to come by as she'd imagined. It's genius, isn't it? You can imagine the writer suddenly being hit by inspiration, jumping for joy as the idea forms in her mind, realising this is a story that has never been seen before and simply has to be brought to life on the big screen, then waiting six hundred years for cinema to be invented.
I've honestly never seen a movie so wholly dependent on cliché. There is literally nothing original in this film. That's not sarcasm, it's not petty sniping or an exaggeration; literally, actually, undeniably, nothing. Every last moment is predictable. Anyone surprised to find Perabo's apartment small and badly decorated has never seen a film before. Anyone amazed by the burglary or disappointed by her lack of success in the first few minutes is as stupid as people who think `Baby on Board' stickers actually prevent car accidents.
For the pre-pubescent girls in the audience there is a love story shallow enough for them to relate to. The supposedly-charming Adam Garcia is the love interest, and the will-they won't-they tension that surrounds the fledgling couple is diminished slightly by him being the only man in the city she actually talks to! We should probably assume the script said there was chemistry between the two leads, but it never made it past the page - they are both gorgeous, and that seems to be enough to convince us they're a good couple that we should be rooting for. But this is a romance so infantile that when Perabo first meets Garcia, he follows her through the dark streets of New York at night, says he's staring at her ass, and she finds it charming!
There are attempts at gritty realism and at showing the hardship and heartbreak of having your ambitions frustrated, but these don't last beyond the second reel. This is Bruckheimer, and realism was never on the agenda. The few scenes that show us the bad breaks in the big city are followed by a cheesy ending and a happily-ever-after for the lead characters that render them insincere. It follows the three-act structure precisely, giving us first the ambition, then the hard times, then the triumph. I yawned my way through all three.
This movie should be held up as the example of everything that is wrong with Hollywood. It's cynically unoriginal, painfully infantile, constantly banal, and so vacuous it could suck the audience out of their seats and into the screen. There are so many reasons to hate this stodgy turd. Seeing Garcia buy rare Spiderman comics in a diner is one of them; seeing the character whose soul purpose is to ask what Coyote Ugly means is another; and suffering the shameless cameo of LeAnn Rimes singing the crappy theme song is the most irritating. I hate this movie, I resent it wasting a hundred minutes of my life, and the only thing more annoying than a film so ruthlessly efficient, so pointless and so banal, are the preteen idiots who actually like it.