Pink, fluffy fun with the all-American girl (From Western Telegraph)

Pink, fluffy fun with the all-American girl

Legally Blonde II

Directed by Charles Herman-Wurmfeld Starring Reese Witherspoon, Sally Field, Regina King, Luke Wilson, Jennifer Coolage. Dur. 94 mins Cert. PG

Yes it's another sequel. I'm not sure how, but it seems that there are more sequels every summer than original movies. Anyway, this sequel comes two years after Legally Blonde, quite a long time by the standards of these kind of films.

Legally Blonde was a silly film about an utterly material, all-American girl, whose boyfriend dumps her instead of proposing. She is, he says, 'not serious enough' for him. Not the kind of girl he intends to find and marry, when he gets to his Ivy League university. She decides to get her own back, and prove that blondes have more fun and brainpower.

She applies her able mind, that's usually devoted to co-ordinating outfits, and promptly gets herself into Harvard Law school, where the bookish peers see what this pampered princess is capable of.

It's one of those films with a simple and ridiculous concept, but with enough cleverly amusing one liners and set-piece gags, with a feel-good ending. It's easy on the eye and the brain.

The sequel, which is in cinemas now, is more or less identical. It only differs from the original, in that it happens to have different settings.

Having discovered that, despite being blonde, she is a 'legal eagle', Elle finds a new cause to fight for. She finds out that her pampered pooch, Bruiser, has a mother that is being held in an animal testing facility, so she sets off for Washington with 'Bruiser's Bill' to see if she can make animal testing illegal.

Reese Witherspoon is excellent again as Elle. Though clueless blondes in teen movies are two a penny in Hollywood these days, Witherspoon's triumph is that it's hard to imagine anyone else playing Elle so well. It's also great to see the incredible Sally Field having fun again. She is great these days in ER as the bi-pola mother of Abbey, but I'm glad she gets to lighten up here, because she does it so well.

All in all Legally Blonde II is good, but for sequels to be great they have to plough new ground. They can't churn up the same patch as first time around and expect the world to take note.

It's as pink, fluffy and funny as you'd expect it to be, so if you really, really liked the first one, you'll like Legally Blonde II. If not you'll enjoy it, but make sure you've got something else to think about for when your mind starts to wonder.

Vaughan Sivell.

PICTURED: Resse Witherspoon as Elle Woods.