Film Reviews

Sisterhood of The Travelling Pants

• Rating:
• Director:
• Starring: Alexis Bledel
• Details: US / 119 mins (PG).

Four teenage girls decide there's magic in the air when they discover that a single pair of jeans somehow fits them all. As they go their separate ways for the summer holidays, they make a pact to share the pants, thus ensuring that each girl gets her fair share of magic. Lena (Bledel) travels to Santorini to stay with her grandparents, Carmen (Ferrara) goes to visit her father, Bridget (Lively) attends a soccer camp in Mexico, while Tibby (Tamblyn) stays at home to concentrate on making a documentary about ordinary people on her hand-held camera. With the aid of the pants, all four come to realise their own worth and value; with the help of one another, all manage to overcome obstacles that lie in the way to maturity. While it might seem unnecessarily cruel to rubbish a movie promoting positive messages to teenage girls, the truth is that The Sisterhood is a messy jumble of condescending cliches. When Lena arrives on Santorini, the soundtrack is that of Zorba the Greek; when Bridget arrives in Mexico, the soundtrack blasts out La Bamba. The whole movie plays like a young teenager girl's dream: it's chock-a-block with sleepovers, European travel, handsome Greek fishermen, secret diaries, first sexual encounters, sounding off at fathers, etc, ad nauseum. "As we all know," says the wanton Bridget, as she prepares to pursue the out-of-bounds soccer coach to a bar, "obsessed girls can't be held responsible for their actions." Perhaps not, but the adults who were in charge of making this movie can be. Director Ken Kwapis' background is in TV (Malcolm in the Middle, Grounded for Life), and the constant cross-cutting between the various storylines is crude and abrupt, ruining any sense of continuity, while Delia Ephron's script is a cynical exercise in wish fulfilment. Tamblyn shines as Tibby, and Santorini looks beautiful; otherwise, this is just pants.

Review by Declan Burke