One joke sitcom

Not much room for that in a Cinderella comedy where Ralph Fiennes plays a Republican candidate running for the Senate and planning his campaign in a swish mid-town hotel. He catches room-maid JLo's room-maid in flagrante, trying on a guest's Dolce & Gabbana suit in order to feel how the other half feels, and, as men will, instantly mistakes the lady for the label. Well, you get the rest.

From making beds to getting into one is a short step. But it's lucky it is not longer, for there is not much stretch in the one joke sitcom that keeps Fiennes in heat and J-Lo in a sweat, running after or away from each other respectively, until she eventually catches him.

Fiennes is at a disadvantage, an actor, not a comedian; but then Hugh Grant can't do an American accent, so that ruled him out for the part. Lopez is a perfectly efficient comedienne. But mixed together, they're a few retorts short of a chemistry lesson.

Women who go to see Maid in Manhattan will certainly go for an eyeful of Lopez, and won't be disappointed.

Once she casts off her maid's apron and slips on the D & G number, an all-white trouser suit and maxicoat, for a lovers' dander in Central Park, she'd stop even a mugger in his tracks.

For the finale at a ritzy soiree held in the Metropolitan Museum's department of Egyptian antiquities, New York's traditional meeting place of old monuments and new money, she adds a Harry Winston 1920s-style diamond necklace to a champagne evening-sheath and a hair-do like a plateful of profiteroles.

The products are beautifully placed. But, as often with such a thin-sliced comedy, it's the supporting characters who butter it: Stanley Tucci as Fiennes's fire-spitting campaign manager; Natasha Richardson bitching away as an Ab Fab British socialite; Bob Hoskins doing a Paul Burrell as the hotel butler and J-Lo's fairy godfather; and Rufus, a diverting weimaraner who, we are told, got the part of Fiennes's doggy companion by sleeping with the producer.

Maid In Manhattan
Cert: certPG