Some like it tepid

In the dizzy, forgettable Connie and Carla, Nia Vardalos and Toni Collette play sweet cabaret singers forced to pose as drag queens while on the run. As in Some Like it Hot, the film's obvious inspiration, our innocent protagonists witness a gangland murder early on and spend the rest of the movie dressed as men dressed as women, looking over their padded shoulders for the hoodlums who have vowed to track them down.

Connie and Carla travel to LA and get jobs at a dinner-theatre venue for drag queens, belting out show tunes while their false eyelashes sparkle under the cheap lights. They become local celebrities, who, for obvious reasons, can have no life outside the show.

Some great songs are wheeled out, not least Cabaret's Maybe This Time, which Vardalos and Collette yell loudly in unison for a very long time, rather like children having a tantrum, hoping to wear you down.

The Marilyn Monroe character here is David Duchovny; his charms prove irresistible to Vardalos, and that threatens to jeopardise their plans and disguise. This is rather hard to take, considering Duchovny has always, even in his X-Files days, looked a bit uncommitted and embarrassed in front of the camera, as though this whole acting lark were something he were obliged occasionally to do when not being a quantity surveyor. Every time he pops up here, he is incredibly handsome and yet entirely uncharismatic: a man born to model an Aquascutum raincoat.

When Vardalos wrote and starred in My Big Fat Greek Wedding - the highest-grossing romantic comedy and independent film yet - she was, for a short time, the most wanted comedienne in Hollywood. In Connie and Carla she comes over as a busted flush (the film, incidentally, bombed in the US) largely because she can muster only two looks: astonishment, with an edge of bitterness, and bitter, with an edge of astonishment.

It's not really that complicated. Connie and Carla flounders because while men dressing up as women is funny (Jack Lemmon or Alec Guinness, that is, and not one's boyfriend), women dressing up as men is not. Men dressing as women is essentially an aspirational gesture, and they can only fall short of what they are aiming for. Women dressing as men has no bathos - it's just cool (think Diane Keaton in a tie).

Connie And Carla
Cert: cert12A