The big MTV video

Given that this is a film designed to show off the considerable singing talents of its star, Beyonce Knowles, it goes some way beyond its origins as an extended MTV video. The plot may be utterly predictable and the story amounts to little more than a hill of beans, but it is a marginally enjoyable entertainment.

Beyonce plays Lily, a feisty single mother in the poor Southern town of Monte Carlo, Georgia. Her situation as a "fallen woman" and the fact that she sings the devil's music in a local bar has alienated her from the members of the local Church of Beulah. When a former resident of Monte Carlo, Darren (Cuba Gooding Jr) returns from New York - where he has been fired from his job in an advertising agency - for his aunt's funeral, Lily recognises him as the young boy who used to court her in church.

A financially over-extended buppie, Darren is delighted to find he has inherited $150,000 from his aunt - on the proviso he whips the church choir into good enough shape to enter a statewide contest, a kind of Battle of the Gospel Choirs. Trouble is, the few members who comprise the choir are truly dreadful.

Directed by British expatriate Jonathan Lynn, The Fighting Temptations delivers exactly what it says on the packet, though not much more. It is forgettable, innocuous froth that goes in one eye and out the other without undue effort. After a slow beginning the humour heats up when the local characters are brought into play, including the preacher and his ferocious sister, the Wicked Witch of the South who quotes church by-laws as if they were scripture.

A shamelessly feelgood movie with a lightweight theme involving honesty, prejudice and hypocrisy, it just about keeps its head above the cliches by virtue of its attractive star and the musical numbers which are effective without being over-produced.

I particularly liked the white, guntoting, whisky-swilling coonass drafted in to play the organ and the three prisoners who perform in their orange boilersuits watched over by shotgunwielding guards. But ultimately it is Beyonce's show and she surreptitiously steals the movie from her co-stars. If nothing else, her rendition of the Peggy Lee standard Fever is enough to raise any man's temperature.