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What did you think of "Coyote Ugly"?   Good 73% 1197   Bad 23% 369   Wait to rent it 4% 71 Total Votes   1637

Grade: D

Verdict: Dog-face hideous.

Details: Starring Piper Perabo, Adam Garcia, Maria Bello and John Goodman. Rated PG-13 for sensuality. 1 hour, 34 minutes.

Rate it: Write your own review

Review: It's a good title. You know, calling a movie Coyote Ugly. Especially one with five hot, boot-wearing chicks stamping on a wooden bar, pulling at their tiny, low-cut tops and vests, raking long-nailed fingers through their sweaty hair while bumping and grinding in tight leather pants and ultra-minis.

The Coyote Ugly come-on is these five women. There's tough bar owner Lil (Maria Bello), sugary-sweet Cammie (Izabella Miko), tie-you-up dominatrix Rachel (Bridget Moynahan), sultry Zoe (Tyra Banks) and -- the new kid in New York -- vulnerable Jersey (Piper Perabo).

They splash whiskey across the bar and set it afire. Amid hoots and catcalls from the clientele crammed into their tiny, dilapidated bar world, the girls hold torches, swig liquor and spew fireballs like curvaceous human flamethrowers. They douse each others' T-shirts with big pitchers of water.

Hello, spring break.

This is high-concept moviemaking from producer Jerry Bruckheimer, who with and without his late partner, Don Simpson, has fashioned a long line of loud, rock 'em, moneymaking films such as Flashdance, Top Gun, Days of Thunder, Con Air and Armageddon. Nary a one of them contained a molecule of brain matter.

Coyote Ugly is profoundly stupid, earnestly inept at conveying a story and hellbent on wallowing in its shallow emotional manipulations. It'll probably make millions.

With the flimsiest of plots, this movie blares nearly 30 songs (including Def Leppard's Pour Some Sugar on Me, EMF's You're Unbelievable, and Kid Rock's Cowboy ). It entices with a single nude silhouette (this movie only boasts skin, it never really displays it). As in that other gloriously bad bar movie Cocktail, the liquor bottles are twirled like six-shooters.

The slapdash story involves a young waif, who, to make ends meet, takes a job at a New York bar called Coyote Ugly. She's Jersey, alias Violet Sanford (Perabo), a struggling songwriter fresh from New Jersey aching for stardom in the big, big city if she can ever get over stage fright. See, she can't sing when anyone's watching her.

So she meets this Australian guy (Adam Garcia). She gets to like him. Maybe even like him. She tells him all about her. He won't say much about himself. You know how it is.

Pretty soon, we're watching him have anxiety over a comic book. She's singing her innocuous songs on her apartment rooftop under a glowing moon.

Suddenly, you're a long way from that rowdy fun-time bar. Now, you're stuck in this gooey glump of a movie about a guy who won't talk and a girl who won't shut up. She lets him have it. "It's so easy being you!" It's the big, bad breakup.

Will they get back together? Will she ever take her singing passion and make it happen? Can this girl really have it all?

Egad. What a feeling.

— Steve Murray, Cox News Service

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