Miss Congeniality

Directed by Donald Petrie, Miss Congeniality follows FBI agent Gracie Hart (Sandra Bullock) as she agrees to go undercover within a beauty pageant to prevent a group from bombing the event. It’s a larger-than-life setup that’s employed to mostly watchable yet undeniably erratic effect by Petrie, as the filmmaker, working from Marc Lawrence, Katie Ford, and Caryn Lucas’ screenplay, delivers a woefully padded-out comedy that is rarely, if ever, able to justify its palpably overlong running time of 109 minutes – with this feeling certainly reflected in a midsection that seems to contain an equal number of effective and superfluous sequences. There’s little doubt, then, that Miss Congeniality benefits substantially from the winning efforts of its impressively (and surprisingly) stacked roster of performers, with Bullock’s predictably affable, charismatic work here matched by such inherently compelling periphery players as Benjamin Bratt, Candice Bergen, and Michael Caine. (The latter is particularly entertaining and enjoyable as a gay pageant coach.) The needlessly protracted climactic stretch is ultimately just about as hit-and-miss as everything that’s come before it and ensures that the whole thing concludes on a rather underwhelming note, which does, in the final analysis, cement Miss Congeniality‘s place as a decent-enough endeavor that could (and should) have been so much better.

**1/2 out of ****