Slap Her, She's French

Starts with an amusingly satiric view on America’s mid-west circa first term Bush, with some gleeful and knowing pot-shots at beauty pageants and the inherent hypocrisy of more extreme right-wingers. It’s an odd shift of focus to Perabo’s foreign exchange student, that the film never quite gets a handle on or manages to bring in to focus – I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that Perabo functions as a cuckoo in the nest, and the film seems set up to dig in to the darker side of “southern hospitality”, but it never eventuates, turning in to an overly familiar, superficial teen comedy. At least it’s well cast, with McGregor and Perabo (always an underrated star) well-matched and good fun to watch – it’s just a shame they weren’t given more to chew on.