Miss Congeniality 2: Armed & Fabulous
- Film Worth:$6.00
- FILMINK rates movies out of $20 - the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
What happens when you make a sweet, unpretentious film that skates by on a wealth...
What happens when you make a sweet, unpretentious film that skates by on a wealth of charm and ends up making millions at the box office? The best thing to do would be to enjoy the success, pat yourself on the back and spend up big. But in Hollywood, less is never more, and so we're now saddled with Miss Congeniality 2: Armed & Fabulous, the muddled, uninspired and often incomprehensible sequel to an original which won points for its unadorned simplicity.
After successfully going undercover in a beauty pageant in the first film, Sandra Bullock's rough-and-tumble FBI agent Gracie Hart now jumps into action again when one of her buddies from the pagent - namely Miss America (Heather Burns) - is kidnapped, along with paegent host Stan Fields (William Shatner, who looks like he's in danger of a booze-and-cholesterol driven collapse at any minute). Thrown together with tough, brusque fellow agent Sam Fuller (Regina King - largely recycling her performance as Reese Witherspoon's bristling and largely unwilling rival-come-sidekick from Legally Blonde 2), Gracie has to battle her own growing fame (everyone now knows her as "that Miss Congeniality girl"), getting dumped by her boyfriend from the first film (Benjamin Bratt was smart enough not to return, though obviously not quite smart enough to say no to Catwoman) and dressing up as a drag queen to catch the bad guys.
Miss Congeniality 2: Armed & Fabulous is a textbook example of the cinematic disease that may appropriately be termed "sequelitus". All the symptoms are here: tired plotting, recycled gags, missing co-stars, the presence of a replacement hack director and the unpleasant feeling that the whole gig has just been cooked up to bring in more money. Though it's near impossible to dull Sandra Bullock's undeniable star-shine and winning screen presence, the bland and resolutely boneheaded Miss Congeniality 2: Armed & Fabulous nearly gets there.
