The Sisterhood Of The Travelling Pants 2
3/7
Sanaa Hamri
In contrast to all the ways Sisterhood Of The Travelling Pants flouted the conventions of the teen genre – rejecting abstinence morality stories, celebrating friendship rather than romance and confronting the anguish divorce can cause – this sequel sits in the middle of the road.
It’s the summer after freshman year of college, and the conflicted would-be actress (America Ferrera), the reckless jock (Blake Lively), the moody misfit (Amber Tamblyn) and the shy artist (Alexis Bledel) are going their separate ways, planning to keep in touch as always by mailing a shared, mystical pair of jeans to one another.
But the characters’ four stories don’t illuminate or contrast with each other: they’re a slapped-together patchwork that could have come from any halfway decent teen movie. The pants-wearing sisters don’t even seem to like each other any more. But let’s stay friends forever! This is passable, but compared to its predecessor, it’s a disappointment.
Margaret Lyons
Dhs85 from Virgin Megastore
Wild Child
3/7
Nick Moore
‘That’s the final straw, you are going to England!’ belts out Malibu dad Aidan Quinn as he sends his brat daughter Emma Roberts across the Atlantic for yet another film set at a British boarding school.
Roberts’s roller-coaster accent of rising vowels and spoiled ‘be-atch’ attitude don’t go down well among the jolly hockeysticks crowd, but those girls, led by uppity head Georgia King, aren’t so palatable either. It takes Roberts’s level-headed roommates to persuade her of the benefits of a more agreeable approach to life.
Adult co-stars Shirley Henderson and Natasha Richardson struggle valiantly as a matron and headmistress and Simon Pegg’s mate Nick Frost has an amusing cameo as a hairdresser, but young Alex Pettyfer (Stormbreaker) as the headmistress’s dishy son is as wooden as Gordon Brown in a wood shop. The directing by Working Title’s long-time editor Nick Moore (Notting Hill, Love Actually) shows little knack for comic timing – but the script offers few gags beyond fart jokes and the basest of cultural-clash observations. This celebration of mid-Atlantic compromise is one for the youngest and most forgiving of teenage girls.
Dave Calhoun
Dhs85 from Virgin Megastore
