Kinky Boots

Charlie Price is having a bad week. His dad died, leaving him in charge of the ailing family shoe company and he's just laid off 15 of his workforce, and now he can't afford to buy his fiancee the Jimmy Choos she wants for the wedding. Being clobbered with a pair of thigh high PVC boots by a burly cabaret singer named Lola hardly seems like the start of things coming together for Charlie, but it appears that a niche market has literally smacked him in the face.

Finding out that nobody wants high quality hand-stitched brogues anymore, Charlie (Joel Edgerton) realises that a change of product is needed. While on a business trip to London he runs into Lola (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and soon realises that there may be a market for certain kinds of "alternative" outfitting. After Charlie makes his first disastrous foray into fetish design it's clear that he's going to need some help making the perfect pairs of kinky boots and Lola is the only one to aid him. With only six weeks to the big fashion show in Milan, he needs to make a new range of exotic footwear, rescue his relationship and get Lola accepted in the shoe factory if he's to save the jobs of his workers and the future of the family company.

Kinky Boots is another in an ever-growing line of almost-true British movies about good honest local folk triumphing in the face of adversity through slightly saucy business practices. Charlie desperately wants to escape his family's leather-clad legacy but is drawn back into it when drag queen Lola forces him to search deep in his heart, to look past his prejudices and see beyond people's appearances to be the best he can be. Are you gagging yet?

It's the same old sentimental tripe that gets rolled out again and again, relaying bland moralisations, laced with a light veneer of sex to make the middle-class protagonist blush, and to keep the bawdy jokes coming thick and fast. Edgerton's embarrassed fumbling in the role of Charlie is uncomfortable to watch and something about his sad, kicked puppy expression - think Hugh Grant without the charm - makes you want to slap him silly. That said, Ejiofor is excellent as Lola, the cabaret numbers are thoroughly enjoyable and the dialogue is occasionally very funny when it's not being mind numbingly obvious.

Kinky Boots is a crowd pleaser at heart, and if you enjoyed Calendar Girls, or The Full Monty, you'll like this, but otherwise walk the other way.