Film Reviews

In Her Shoes

• Rating:
• Director: Curtis Hanson
• Starring: Cameron Diaz, Toni Collette, Shirley McLaine
• Details: US, 130 mins, 12s

Maggie (Diaz) and Rose (Collette) are two sisters who have nothing in common except their shoe size. Maggie is the attractive out-going sexy type who barely finished high school and has trouble reading so she believes all she has to offer is the way she looks. Rose, suffering from weight problems and never bothered by the boys growing up, threw herself at the books in college and is now working for a top lawyer firm. When the sisters have a falling out, and Maggie sleeps with Rose's potential boyfriend, she is thrown out of her apartment and travels to Florida to meet the grandmother (McLaine) she thought was dead. Can her grandmother reconcile the differences between the sisters? In Her Shoes is a re-hash of every chick-lit flick and has really nothing new to offer the scene: the successful unattractive woman can't get a man; the attractive woman can't get a job; the men are either cardboard cut-out asses or one dimensional white knights that the lead doesn't realise until the final act. Aw. The flaws writer Jennifer Weiner gives her female characters in the hope it will give them some emotional depth seem to be stuck on with Blu-Tack and In Her Shoes is a bland story by numbers as a result. Hanson is proving that LA Confidential was a flash in the pan.

Review by Gavin Burke