Legally Blondes

Ostensibly a sequel to the much-loved Reese Witherspoon series, this risible bit of amateurism features none of the characters, wit, or entertainment value of its progenitors (although it does come with a Witherspoon endorsement). Lesson two: Reese Witherspoon just might be an idiot.

What was cute, and mostly clever, in the original films is here replaced by an unexamined sexism and a series of contrivances that, instead of being fun, are merely annoying. Reese’s Elle was winning because she was both adorable and highly capable (and ultimately successful). That was the trick of the Legally Blonde films. It was about laughing at a caricature of a girly girl trying to make it in a man’s world, before finding (as do the man’s world representatives she’s up against) that the laugh was actually on us.

For all of her perfumed resumes and pink ensembles, Elle turns out to be a woman of substance and depth. It’s the old don’t-judge-a-book-by-its-cover deal, with a little post-feminist zaniness thrown in. It was all utterly preposterous, but at least it wasn’t lazy.

Not so for the obnoxiously-titled Legally Blondes. This is the story of a pair of fake-accented, blandly-pretty, and terminally perky teenaged twins who move with their daddy from England to Beverly Hills for some reason, only to find that they don`t quite fit in. (This is amazing – I have just discovered that these two young ladies were actually born in England, which means that their distractingly fake English accents are somehow real! The mind boggles!)