Not a complete load of bullocks! (Miss Congeniality 2 - Armed And Fabulous (DVD))

Name: Ailran

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Product:	Miss Congeniality 2 - Armed And Fabulous (DVD)
Date:	15/04/07 (167 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Fun, lighweight and a laugh

Disadvantages: too lightweight storywise.

Miss Congeniality was a fun lightweight comedy that managed to mix humour and a detective story very well while also managing to squeeze in the age old story of a duck out of water. In this case the tomboyish FBI agent Gracie, played by Sandra Bullock, becoming part of a beauty contest as an undercover assignment and discovering her feminine side.
The ending of the first film left the story with nowhere to go really. Having changed Gracie from tomboy to woman what could a sequel add to the story? The writers obviously discovered the same problem and tried hard to hit upon somewhere for this sequel to go. From my point of view I think they just about succeeded, as Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous (and that is the only time I am going to use its full title!) is not as bad as I thought it was going to be.

Miss Con 2 starts 3 weeks after the first film and Gracie is on an undercover with a team of agents. They have had a tip off that a group of armed robbers are about to strike and go into the bank to be ready to catch them in action. The assignment nearly goes wrong when one of the customers recognises Gracie and shouts out her name, attracting the attention of everybody else in the bank. While the robbers are caught Gracie’s partner is shot and injured.
Realising that she is now a liability to the FBI on such missions Gracie reluctantly accepts a new position offered to her by her boss and the Director of the FBI… that of being the public face of the organisation.
She spends the next ten months (which passes by in an instant!) promoting a book about her adventures and being the good side of the FBI on chat shows, during press conferences and the like.
She is accompanied in her new job by Joel, her overly camp personal assistant (played by Diedrich Bader – The Drew Carey Show) and newly transferred female agent with anger management problems who no one else will work with.

Then the main story starts, the current Miss America, and Gracie’s best friend, Cheryl has been kidnapped along with Stan Fields (William Shatner) the organiser/front man of the pageant. The FBI sends Gracie and her team to Las Vegas to deal with the press side of the case while the local agents, led by Treat Williams, investigate the actual kidnapping.
Question is can Gracie hold back while her best friend is in danger? Are her investigative skills still good enough after ten months of being a personality? In fact will she remember that is in fact still an FBI agent? You will have to watch this to find out!

This is what Sandra Bullock does best, the intelligent but fun woman, almost dizzy but with a bit more about her. She has made attempts to break away from comedy roles but it is in those films that she excels, in my opinion anyway.

The opening bank scene bodes well for the rest of the film, the mix of humour and action creating a microcosm of the whole film. The whole 10-15 minutes echoing the intentions of the complete story …… a cop comedy, while reintroducing Gracie to the audience. This is followed up by a smart and witty removal of the love interest gained at the end of the original. So far so good, a better start than I was expecting!

The introduction of the newly transferred Sam Fuller (Regina King) adds a foil for Gracie’s shifting nature. She is still the feisty, aggressive tomboy from the first movie but has learnt from her pageant experience and her new PR assignment changes her even more. Fuller is like she used to be but to a further extreme and the face offs and arguments between the two are snappy and fun!

Miss Con 2 has some great laugh out loud scenes, a cast that complement each other well and act competently enough, Bader, Bullock, King and Enrique Marciano (as Jeff Gracie’s Las Vegas liaison) all put in first-rate performances. It also has a halfway decent story and some likeably odd characters (one of the thugs has a BA in Fine Arts and designed one of the big shows in a Las Vegas hotel) but even with all that Miss Con 2 just doesn’t have the charm and originality of the film it follows.

This is one of those rare occasions where I know I was both disappointed and pleased at the same time. Pleased because I thought this film would be a complete disaster and it can by no means be called that. The opening half hour or so is good, if lightweight, fun but when the main plot starts it heads into predictability and loses a lot of the plus points it has built up.
Disappointed because it could have been even better, though I’m not entirely convinced of that, and just didn’t quite manage to hit its stride fully. For a comedy I think it just runs on a little too long, outstaying its welcome slightly.
Even Shatner, hamming it up gloriously, cannot save this part of the film from sliding slowly down the scale. Even the two thugs are well developed, and slightly different from what you expect.

Overall Miss Con 2 is fun and enjoyable, there is a enough good things in it that make it worth recommending for DVD viewing, or maybe just waiting til next time it comes up on TV.

Summary: The FBI beauty queen is back