Week of May 4, 2006, Issue #550
FILM
These Kinky Boots aren't made for walking
WILLOW SHARPE / willow@vueweekly.com
Made by the same team that brought us Calendar Girls, Kinky Boots is another attempt to cash in on the formula that made their previous film—as well as its own predecessor The Full Monty—so successful.Take a bunch of Brits in a crisis (usually economic) and find some cute slapstick humour as they devise a way out of it, normally involving the removal of clothes. This time out it’s the leather boot market, although the recipe has begun to show its age. While The Full Monty was a great film and Calendar Girls a good one, Kinky Boots is simply ordinary at best.
Its heart is in the right place and all of the performers give their best, but they are let down by a contrived script that we’ve unfortunately seen too many times before. It has the distinct feeling of being something that would be better suited to television—ticking all the correct boxes but never engaging the audience enough. And while it does deliver some laughs, there are long portions when it fails to muster a giggle.
Charlie Price (Joel Edgerton) sports the most unconvincing accent from another era, as well as a series of costumes that are undoubtedly supposed to recall memories of the old English film Billy Liar. Charlie’s problems begin when he inherits his late father’s shoe factory and discovers that the old man has been pretending everything is fine when the reality is he hasn’t sold many pairs since Hush Puppies hit the market. With a chirpy and hard-working factory floor to keep in booze and smokes, Charlie has to come up with a new business plan.
This arrives in the unlikely form of Lola (whom Charlie encounters in a somewhat unbelievable manner), a cross-dressing male played with relish by Chiwetel Ejiofor. Lola is a singer in a nightclub, and when she takes Charlie there one night, a lightbulb is switched on—the gap in the market his father’s company needs to exploit is for transvestites. Girls’ shoes simply can’t take the weight of a burly 200-pound man in a miniskirt.
With Lola on board as designer, the inevitable ensues, and the film becomes a culture clash as the brassy chanteuse from Soho takes on the reluctant, and in some cases, prejudiced workforce. Some backstory involving Charlie’s plans to get married as well as Lola’s own situation tries to fill out a fairly lightweight story.
This is really the key to the film’s blandness (as well as a notable lack of really good jokes): it simply takes too many situations, makes them into a crisis, and resolves them with little apparent effect on the plot.
Suffice to say that a catwalk finale at the Milan fashion fair fails to send it out on a high. While these boots don’t exactly stink, they’re not worth rushing out to spend hard-earned cash on. V
Opens Fri, May 5
Kinky Boots
Directed by Julian Jarrold
Written by Geoff Deane, Tim Firth
Starring Joel Edgerton, Chiwetel Ejiofor