FilmBlather.com

Without any big stars or anything else that would guarantee box-office success but with a shrewd, well-targeted marketing campaign, Coyote Ugly has all the makings of a summer sleeper hit. My personal feeling is that it damn well better be one. This thoughtful, vibrant throwback to Flashdance is being torn apart by critics hellbent on abusing producer Jerry Bruckheimer (mostly because of his involvement in bigger, dumber films like The Rock, Con Air, Gone in 60 Seconds, etc.) while its virtues are willfully ignored.

Having graduated high school, Violet (Piper Perabo) is leaving her small New Jersey hometown and making the 42-mile trip to New York City so she can pursue a songwriting career. Her loving father (John Goodman) is devastated that she is following in her deceased mother's footsteps and taking such a big risk. He reluctantly lets her go (she promises that she will return every Sunday) and she moves into an awful apartment in one of the worst parts of the city. She writes her songs with an electric keyboard on the roof of the building and spends most of her time trying to make recording companies listen to them. Not surprisingly, she can't even get past the first secretaries.

Since she can't get the big dogs to give her the time of day and being too proud to ask her toll collector dad for help, Violet soon realizes that she is stuck in the big city with no source of income. At a diner one night she sees four women, around the same age as herself, literally rolling in cash. Her first thought is that the scantily clad foursome must be hookers but she soon finds out that they are actually "Coyotes," a name for the bartenders in a popular establishment called, mysteriously, "Coyote Ugly." When Violet visits Lil (Maria Bello), the owner of the bar, to apply for a job, she is given an "audition" and told to come in Friday night.

Violet eagerly enters Coyote Ugly and is utterly shocked by what she sees -- hundreds of horny males cheering wildly as the sexy employees do elaborate dance numbers on the bar wearing explicitly revealing clothes. She's ready to leave, thinking that there's no way she's doing this (on top of everything else, she's afflicted with a bad case of stage fright) when she's snatched up by Lil. She's apprehensive at first, but when placed in a tight situation, she hops on the bar and does a steamy rendition of Blondie's "One Way or Another," making her a Coyote at long last.

There's a romance, too, involving a hunky Aussie short-order cook (Adam Garcia), but it seems phony compared to everything else. The bar is where the heart of Coyote Ugly really lies. It's a great setting and a great idea -- as we soon learn, having a bunch of aroused men ogle while she dances seductively is liberating for a time but is, in the end, only illusory success. The film milks this concept for all its worth, even basing the romance on it (Violet's love interest, you see, has no family and his dream was simply to make it in New York on his own). The result sneaks up on you -- the glossy exterior turns out to have a surprisingly affecting center.

All of the bar scenes absolutely shine, with a raucous, infectious, exhilirating anything-goes atmosphere. It becomes easy to see why Violet finds working there so liberating. While some of Coyote Ugly's other sequences border on embarassing, when the film returns to its title setting, you know you're in for something cool.

The film's best performance, for my money, comes not from lead Piper Perabo but from Maria Bello as the owner of Coyote Ugly. She symbolizes the bar's spirit and watching her spontaneous, sarcastic manner consistently brought a smile to my face. Perabo herself looks and acts like a young Julia Roberts -- whether that's a virtue or a vice I will leave up to you.

In the end, of course, everything turns out a little too peachy to be believed. Still, the journey there is rewarding. I am convinced that if Coyote Ugly wasn't aggressively marketed as a Jerry Bruckheimer film, the mainstream critical reaction would have been much more positive. As it stands, the movie may just earn itself a place in the land of sleeperdom.