Sentimental fluff (spoilers)

Rating: Null/10 (22 August 2004)

"Pretty Woman" isn't too bad a picture for the very early 1990s. Though it's two principals have been better, they have been an awful lot worse. They don't set the screen alight, but they have enough chemistry to just about sustain this two-hour Hollywood fairytale about a businessman and a hooker.
Richard Gere plays it straight as a New York broker who visits Los Angeles to finalise a hostile takeover, then gets lost in downtown LA when he borrows his friend's car to get to his plush hotel. Stopping on a street corner, he asks for directions from a plucky prostitute (Julia Roberts) who talks her way into his car. Taken with her gutsy charm, he asks her to keep him company for the week. A strange and unlikely love affair quickly develops...
The script is a fairly straightforward boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-gets-girl-back-again sort of affair. The dialogue is filled with the standard characters and cliches for this sort of thing (including the usual sources of comic relief) but contains one or two interesting lines. Gere makes a funny analogy between businessmen and hookers - 'We both screw people for money' and there is an intriguing observation about musical opera.
Richard Gere can be smug and vacuous onscreen sometimes, but happily that isn't the case here. He is warm and restrained, and gives his character some credible depth. Roberts, initially seen as an ugly duckling prostitute, quickly blossoms into a stunning beauty and her onscreen charm and winning smile are enough to carry her through. In other roles, Hector Elizondo is a hoot as the camp hotel manager, and Jason Alexander is appropriately slimy as Gere's business attorney. Laura San Giacomo, as Roberts' vulgar best friend, strikes the only bum note.
The film is well accentuated by a decent Nineties score that includes the title track "Pretty Woman" and the Roxette hit "It Must Have Been Love".
"Pretty Woman" is a harmless, sentimental piece of fluff that should appeal to anyone who enjoys a good fairytale.