Fun and snappy, but too predictable with little depth

Rating: 5/10 (18 March 2017)

Released in 2000, "Coyote Ugly" is a drama starring Piper Perabo as a singer/composer who leaves her home in nearby New Jersey with her dad (John Goodman) to try her hand at the music business in the big city. For money, she gets a gig at a nightclub hotspot where the female workers dance on top of the bar for entertainment, amongst other things, like dumping ice on customers now and then, spraying others with the soda gun and occasionally pouring liquor on the bar and setting it aflame (Why Sure!). Maria Bello plays the owner of the bar while Adam Garcia plays the girl's potential beau.
Perabo plays a thoroughly winsome heroine and the movie's fun with a kinetic soundtrack (with, for example, "Pour Some Sugar on Me" playing twice). After the first act though the movie never really takes off and the story becomes predictably bland, albeit still entertaining.
While the movie wasn't a big hit, it was moderately successful at the box office and has become a semi-iconic film. A mere 2 years after its release I was in Las Vegas and there was an establishment called Coyote Ugly with an alluring woman dancing out front on a raised platform to draw in customers. That was my first exposure to "Coyote Ugly" and I asked my brother-in-law about it; to which he informed me it was a movie. One of the problems with the film is that the girl dancing out front of that Vegas nightclub was far more fetching than any of the actresses dancing in the movie. The women simply aren't curvy enough to engender much fascination. Perabo is arguably the best, followed by blond cutie Izabella Miko, but Miko and the rest (e.g. Bridget Moynahan and Melanie Lynskey) seriously looked like they needed to gain about 15 lbs. at least. But, I suppose if you like women with the shape of 12 year-old boys you might appreciate this element more than me.
Another problem is the emphasis on the nightclub lifestyle and the soused antics thereof. If bars are your thang then you'll probably favor this movie more than I did. Thankfully, the protagonists eschew the drunkard lifestyle and the movie's to be commended for this (the filmmakers obviously wanted to "have their cake and eat it too").
But those are minor quibbles. The biggest problem with "Coyote Ugly," beyond the story being predictable, is that there's no meat on the bones, so to speak. Take the subplot with the boyfriend and his big revelation scene; it was underwhelming and weakly executed, to say the least. Moreover, I just saw the movie last night and I can't even remember if the protagonist "makes it" in the music business at the end. That's how forgettable the film is.
A couple of years after the flick was released my wife asked a 9 year-old girl what her favorite movie was and she enthusiastically said "Coyote Ugly!" That tells you something about the film's depth.
The picture runs 100 minutes and was shot in South Amboy, New Jersey; Atlantic Beach, Long Island; New York City; and Tower Theatre & Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles. DIRECTOR: David McNally. WRITER: Gina Wendkos.
GRADE: C+