Sweet Home Alabama: Critic Reviews

Shallow.

If Sweet Home Alabama, directed by Andy Tennant from a screenplay by C. Jay Cox, has the ingredients for a classic screwball comedy, the movie is in such a rush to entertain that it barely connects the dots of its story.

Sweet Home Alabama is the latest picture to give you the sense that Hollywood filmmakers simply plucked another old pop-tune title ripe for ripping off, then were shaken by the rude reality of coming up with a script to jerry-build around it.

Physical charms are no match for the generic predictability of the story.

If you're a fan of Witherspoon, this movie was produced, shot, edited and distributed entirely for you.

Will the parties responsible for kidnapping Reese Witherspoon and putting a grinning replicant in her place please bring her back?

Despite her relentless vim and winsome facial symmetry, Witherspoon is just too dialed-up to be America's Sweetheart.

It's leaden and predictable, and laughs are lacking.

The movie is genial but never inspired, and little about it will stay with you.

I enjoyed Witherspoon and the local color, but I am so very tired of the underlying premise.

This movie is phony, phony, phony.

If you can tolerate the redneck-versus-blueblood cliches that the film trades in, Sweet Home Alabama is diverting in the manner of Jeff Foxworthy's stand-up act.

A banal, virulently unpleasant excuse for a romantic comedy.

Using her blond, blue-eyed pout to full advantage, Witherspoon is just as likable as a Southern belle as she was as a California sorority girl in Legally Blonde.

Would be an unendurable viewing experience for this ultra-provincial New Yorker if 26-year-old Reese Witherspoon were not on hand to inject her pure fantasy character, Melanie Carmichael, with a massive infusion of old-fashioned Hollywood magic.

It's as preposterous and phony as a Confederate C-note, but Reese Witherspoon has so much natural beauty, talent and charm she guarantees more fun than the day the hogs ate Willie.

Overly eager-to-please pic is as formulaic as any sitcom and is the first film to feature rising star Reese Witherspoon in an unintentionally unflattering light.

Witherspoon is such a delight -- her comic timing so good, and her pixie-ish good looks so fascinating -- that she manages to make Sweet Home Alabama seem charming and funny.

A movie with a more sitcomic premise you are unlikely to find.

Reese Witherspoon makes the proverbial silk purse out of a sow's ear in the romantic comedy Sweet Home Alabama, demonstrating how even the most mediocre of material can be redeemed by a convincing performance.

Light to the point of disposability, Sweet Home Alabama is a small screwball comic idea that spins out far too long.

Every time you look, Sweet Home Alabama is taking another bummer of a wrong turn.

Die-hard fans of Witherspoon and the romantic comedy genre will probably find enough to like in this film to make it worth a trip to the theater. Everyone else would be best served by spending their hard-earned money on something else.