Legally Blonde 2

She may be a fiercely charismatic performer, but on the evidence of her last few movies, Reese Witherspoon can't pick a decent script to save her life. Take the air-headed sequel to the slight but fairly inoffensive 2001 surprise hit, Legally Blonde. A vapid, pointless comedy with nothing to say, the only thing that the follow-up has going for it is the sheer force of Witherspoon's personality. And that is simply not enough. She, of course, reprises her role as Elle Woods, the sprightly young woman who took Harvard by storm in the first movie. This time around, as she prepares for her wedding to law professor Emmet (a bland Luke Wilson), Elle stumbles across some unsavoury animal testing in her search for her the mother of her dog. Disgusted that her pooch's mother is being subjected to testing and won't be able to make the wedding (I'm not making this up), Elle heads off to Capitol Hill to educate Congress about animal rights.

Extraordinarily repetitive, Legally Blonde 2 is a one gag movie with a dubious moral message (underestimate blondes at your peril), which is rammed home at every opportunity. The brash, one-dimensional nature of the material means that there's no real development in the narrative and the entire film appears to be a collection of lumbering set pieces, displaying precious little wit or humour. When the writing is this limited, there's not an awful lot any actor can do and Witherspoon is no different. While she gave a hint of definition in the first instalment, here she is content, like every other woman in the movie, to dumb things down as much as possible. Think of it as the bland leading the Blonde.