Release Date: July 2, 2003
Starring: Reese Witherspoon, Sally Field, Bob Newhart, Luke Wilson, Jennifer Coolidge, Regina King, Bruce McGill
Directed by: Charles Herman-Wurmfeld
Written by: Kate Kondell
Distributed by: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
MPAA Rating: PG-13 (some sex-related humor)
“You’ve made it farther than any of us ever have. And you’ve maintained your bounce and sparkle,” a character says to Elle Woods in Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde. It’s a statement that unwittingly sums up the spirit of both this sequel and its 2001 predecessor, Legally Blonde: Woods, the perky, blonde sorority queen-turned-Harvard Law grad-turned-animal rights activist played with perfectly manicured aplomb by Reese Witherspoon, can achieve anything if she just sets her mind to it. And she can do it in style.
But the stereotype, a joke that was already stretched quite thin in the first Legally Blonde, clearly doesn’t have the elasticity for a second movie. For this installment, the story, which is scripted by Kate Kondell and directed by Charles Herman-Wurmfeld, doesn’t even bother with the usual stock of blonde jokes. Instead, it wants the audience to be impressed with the overachieving Elle Woods.
Why? It’s not as though she’s saddled with some handicap or deficiency that might make her exploits more remarkable. She’s just plain stupid. And the plot -- Elle’s animal rights crusade on Capitol Hill -- is not only excruciating to watch but so fantastically improbable that it makes the first movie, in which Elle graduates from Harvard Law School, look mildly realistic.
Having made it big as a lawyer at the end of the first movie, Elle now has plans to marry her dedicated beau, Emmett (Luke Wilson, who has perhaps 10 minutes of screen time). Intending to invite the parents of her chihuahua, Bruiser, to the wedding, she discovers through a bizarre series of events that they are being used as test animals for a cosmetics company, and when her law firm won’t take the case, she decides to go it alone in Washington.
She puts her marriage plans on hold, gets a job as an aide to her Congressional representative (Sally Field), and as in the first film, though she initially puts up with a lot of much-deserved flak from her new colleagues, she eventually wins everyone over with her suffocating charm and everyone lives happily ever after.
Except for the audience, that is. Witherspoon does her best to keep the movie afloat, and to her credit, she perfectly replicates the bouncy, irrepressible, empty-headed, good-natured charm that won her a lot of critical acclaim in 2001. But the story’s world has outgrown her character in more ways than one. For instance, the writer and the director expect the audience to believe that Elle, as brainless as she is, would have survived at least a year in the real world without picking up any smarts or sense whatsoever (in fact, her stupidity may even be more exaggerated for this sequel). Of course, if such logic applied to the Legally Blonde universe, this sequel couldn’t exist, a hope that is almost too good to be true.
Wilson, who was a major player in the first movie, is decidedly absent from this movie. It’s as if, having one of the most attractive string of female costars a man could want -- prior to his appearance opposite Witherspoon he starred in Alex and Emma alongside Kate Hudson and turned up in Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle next to Cameron Diaz -- he didn’t want to push his luck with too substantial an appearance in an insufferable sequel like this (coincidentally, his time is also limited in Full Throttle). But taking his place as the movie’s most enjoyable actor is screen veteran Bob Newhart, who plays a Washington, D.C., hotel doorman who helps Elle navigate the ins and outs of Capitol Hill etiquette.
There are a bunch of other characters in the movie who are the kind of people you never meet in real life -- individuals content to be the supporting parts in someone else’s story. Bruce McGill, one of those actors who can be seriously goofy and goofily serious, plays a Congressman friendly to Elle but occasionally looks like he wishes he could slink out of the picture, especially after an embarrassing (though admittedly somewhat humorous) scene in which his dog has a homosexual fling with Bruiser.
Regina King plays another aide to Sally Field’s Congresswoman who has it in for Elle, a part that seems horribly contrived considering that everyone in the audience knows Elle is going to succeed (it’s her movie, after all). But perhaps most unwelcome is Jennifer Coolidge, who plays Elle’s ditzy, hot dog-munching friend Paulette; about the only good thing to be said about her character or Coolidge’s performance is that it’s a good thing the movie wasn’t about her.
Witherspoon was apparently reluctant for the movie to be about her as well, because it took six times as much money to get her to return for the sequel (she made $2.5 million for the first one, compared to a whopping $15 million for Red, White & Blonde). At least we know she’s not as dumb as the character she plays, because if anyone in Hollywood had any sense at all, the script and all materials for Legally Blonde 2 would’ve been trashed before the film even made it to pre-production.
-- Craig Roush (crr225@nyu.edu)