Sweet Home Alabama<br></br>Hey Arnold! The Movie

Goodbye quick-witted Witherspoon, hello vacuous blonde

Short of checking in for a weekend at Dolly Parton's Dollywood, you couldn't have a more theme-park view of Southern life than the new Reese Witherspoon comedy Sweet Home Alabama. Why, you got yourself good ol' boys, good ol' gals and good ol' dawgs; you got line-dancin', beer-drinkin' and anvil-tossin' (yes, anvil-tossin'); you even got a graveyard for said good ol' dawgs, with doggie headstones for a romantic heroine to do some sobbin' and soul-searchin' on. And you got yourself Lynyrd Skynyrd playing the title song twice (the band whose spelling reflects the way some folks feel about 'em: Y? Y? Y? Y?).

Meanwhile in New York, those flouncy high-falutin' folks are attending fashion shows and fundraisers, fretting over Women's Wear Daily, and enjoying private after-hours trysts in Tiffany's. And my, the traffic! And the tall buildings! Sweet Home Alabama offers as cartoonishly polarised a view of the North-South divide as the L'il Abner comic strip, but without the satire. It's hard to know who such films are made for. Surely there can't be any moviegoers in all America sufficiently jejune to gawp yet again at the glamour of metropolitan high life, but then neither can you imagine city folk willing to chuckle one more time at the rough-diamond antics of the film's lovable rednecks. The film's only conceivable domestic audience is middle America – literally middle America, in that it's probably best watched while stupefied on an internal flight, suspended over Nebraska, the only available distraction from the prospect of deep-vein thrombosis.

Sweet Home Alabama nevertheless made it to number one in US cinemas, consolidating Reese Witherspoon's status as a star attraction: she's now considered to have definitively clawed her way into the box-office pertness pantheon alongside Julia Roberts and Sandra Bullock. Till now, Witherspoon was quick-witted and sweetly acidic, distinguished by saucer eyes and a quizzically jutting chin directed like a guided missile towards the main chance. She never cared that much to be loved: in Election, she was an authentically abrasive high-school monster, and even in Legally Blonde, a mere wisp of low-cal candyfloss, her relish for a lurid persona saved the day.

Now it looks as if her agent has advised her to soften up, broaden her appeal: Sweet Home Alabama is Mills and Boon with pratfalls. La 'Spoon plays Melanie, an up-and-coming fashion designer engaged to marry an extravagantly bouffanted smoothie (Patrick Dempsey), whose mother (steely-jawed Candice Bergen, the kind of bitchy quality you just can't buy) is the Democrat mayor of New York. But Melanie has a score to settle back in her humble old Alabama home, with her no-count, rough-hewn, shitkickin' first husband, played by Josh Lucas – a poor gal's Matthew McConaughey, with an underwear model physique and eyes that have (as William Burroughs used to say) the look of a sheep-killing dog.

As soon as the couple are reunited, the film livens up and Witherspoon's voice acquires a strident snakebite edge: spotting Lucas, jeans larded with engine oil, she spits, "What, they ran out of soap at the Piggly Wiggly?" The two characters display the sort of hearty mutual loathing that usually, in a romantic comedy, means that a couple will one day have great sex; here, it suggests they've already shagged each other silly when they were barely into their teens. This is one of two snappy lines; the other is Melanie's wedding reminiscence, "I went to the reception by myself with puke all down my dress".

Thereafter, director Andy Tennant feels obliged to remind us we're watching a comedy, with waggish harmonicas on the soundtrack and a mirth-killing bit of business with a collapsing chair. The wasted talent includes the great dogfaced Fred Ward, as well as Melanie Lynskey, Kate Winslet's murderous inamorata in Heavenly Creatures, here allowed a glimmer of a living, breathing performance, which is of course surplus to requirements.

It doesn't really matter, though, what anyone's doing except Witherspoon. The poster is just a big beaming head and shoulders: she's now in the bracket of those stars who don't even need a concept to help them open a movie, just their baby blue eyes. Her character here is softer than it's ever been, though it starts off appealingly callous and snooty: given decent direction, Melanie could have been as rivetingly dislikeable as Christina Ricci's über-slut in The Opposite of Sex. Witherspoon's extraordinary features use every angle, every twitching dimple, to keep things lively: eyebrows arch, chin stabs, mouth twists into moues of incredulity. For peevish apprehension, there's no one like her. But, over the grave of the faithful old dog that she deserted, the eyes well up and catch the moonlight just so, and you can see a profitable career ahead as a Mary Pickford for the Starbucks generation.

It's a sign of how committee-built such movies are that one moment stands out like a surreal beacon: Melanie walks through a field of dead Confederate soldiers who all suddenly come back to life (it's a fancy-dress restaged battle). The South will rise again, as one character whoops, while the smarmy citified Democrats are revealed as schemers and chisellers. No prize for guessing who finally wins Melanie's affections, but he has to open a chichi glassware boutique to do it. It's the most unbelievable fairy-tale about the South since Monster's Ball.

Hey Arnold! The Movie shows how little character a cartoon character can get away with: its boy hero is distinguished by his plucky disposition and weirdly elongated head, and that's about it. His attempts to save his neighbourhood from an evil developer are sermonisingly scripted and dreary to look at – just a scratchy notch or two above the level of Scooby Doo (which at one point, it has the nerve to parody). A smattering of saving graces: a gag about a man turning into the Incredible Hulk on exposure to gherkins; an instantly recognisable bit of voice work from the great Christopher Lloyd; and grouchy anti-heroine Helga, essentially Lucy from Peanuts with a Frida Kahlo eyebrow. Jennifer Jason Leigh contributes her voice too: after Road to Perdition, this is only the year's second most pointless waste of her talents.

j.romney@independent.co.uk