What A Girl Wants

What a girl wants? That might be: a very rich husband, but for the time being, a very rich daddy, and... emm... well, the rich daddy will do, I suppose, once he lives in a great big swish mansion. And it would be great if he looked like Colin Firth! This, not to be at all reductive, appears to be the entire message of What A Girl Wants, a noxious though cynically astute slice of Jane Austen-informed escapist fluff for teenage girls.

Vaguely like Clueless but nowhere near as sharp, the film stars the incessantly smiling Amanda Bynes (TV’s The Amanda Show) as a good-natured teenage bubblehead who lives at home in New York with mom, but then gets the chance to go and stay with her doting daddy for the summer in his indefensibly plush English countryside home. Of course, he turns out to be played by Colin Firth, the mopey-faced gentleman who is adored and worshipped like no other man alive by the hordes of desperate no-life women who glutton vats of ice-cream while watching Pride And Prejudice and cuddling fluffy toys.

The central gag is that the girl’s carefree American ways contrast starkly with the stuffiness of the horsey-set toffs who move in daddy’s rarefied social circles (he’s a Conservative Member of Parliament). This renders her something of a social embarrassment, but by the end, she’s got them all dancing to James Brown tunes, while her stuffed-shirt dad has been reduced to playing air-guitar solos in the mirror and wearing ’70s rock-god leather trousers. Throw in a lame jealous-stepsister subplot, an obligatory dweeby boyfriend who travels the earth (well, the Atlantic) to prove his love, and you have a concoction which, if nothing else, ruthlessly understands its Just Seventeen-reading target audience.

Overall, though, What A Girl Wants suffers from a typically unpleasant chick-flick worldview, purporting to condemn snobbery while unconsciously embracing it at every single turn. Still, whatever its flaws, it beats Legally Blonde 2 to pulp.