Film Reviews

Burlesque

• Rating:
• Director:
• Starring: Cher
• Details: US/118mins 12A

Musicals have really had their day. Every once and a while one will pop up (Grease, Chicago) that results in a slew of shoddy copycats hoping to cash in (Nine, Rent), but for the most part they're best confined to the bright lights of Broadway and a different cinematic time. This camp Christina Aguilera starrer at least realises how silly it is and mercifully embraces the cheesiness.
Aguilera is a small town girl from Iowa who ditches her waitressing job on a whim and heads for the bright shiny lights of Los Angeles in search of stardom. Pretty soon she stumbles across Cher's Burlesque club, and manages to talk her way into a gig as a waitress. But she really wants to be on the stage shaking what god gave her, and belting out some tunes. Cam Gigandet's dreamy barman is the totty, Eric Dane's swish real estate tycoon the conflict and Stanley Tucci his usual brilliant self - as Cher's right hand man.
Plot wise it's fair to say that films don't come much more clichéd that Burlesque. Cher is under pressure to flog her club with a bank foreclosure looming, when Dane's business man offers her a way out. Aguilera's talented but naive Ali, meanwhile, has been seen in countless films, not all of them musicals. But there's a certain charm here, probably the unpretentious breezy way it approaches the story and musical numbers, that just makes what should be a car crash production somehow fun.
In fairness to Aguilera she's pretty solid in her first starring role, and she holds her own opposite Oscar winner, Cher. The latter acting as a maternal figure dishes out lines like "I picked you up from the sidewalk puking out everything but your memories," is obviously enjoying herself, especially when sharing the screen with Tucci. Sure, he's basically playing the same gay guide to the hierarchy that he did in The Devil Wears Prada, but he does so with panache and immense likeability.
It's really Coyote Ugly with corsets, but Burlesque doesn't try and be anything more. More entertaining than it has any right to be.

Review by Mike Sheridan