Elle Review – This Legally Blonde prequel recreates the genius of Reese Witherspoon’s performance | TV and radio

IIt’s been 25 years since I became a real movie star. Over the past quarter century, you have remained a respected actor and become a powerful producer. The appetite is growing for teen-driven dramas that, for reasons of nostalgia or muscle-bound ice hockey players, appeal to a generation or two above. You are Reese Witherspoon. What do you do?

Take the IP off Legally Blonde, dust it off and make a small screen prequel to the box office hit that has become a cult classic, of course! You can maximize your chances of success by casting an attractive young character (Lexi Minetree) who can capture all the sass and sweetness of the original protagonist, Elle Woods, and recreate the genius of your own performance by making her self-aware without being daft.

This time, it makes her a high school student instead of a grad/freshman at Harvard, and retools the fish-out-of-water tale by forcing her out of her Bel-Air bubble (thanks to a botched celebrity nose job performed by her father, requiring them to move out of town) and moving her to Seattle (and since we’re in the mid-’90s, there’s no sadder place) where she’ll have to make new friends at a new school full of students. They mean girls and boys who assure her that “pink is not a personality.” Hopefully that’s enough to make it feel fresh and not enough to scare off any fans you’re hoping for — I mean, look at Greta Gerwig’s Barbie! – They’ll be flocking to revive the magic of bubble gum of yesteryear. You can call it Elle and it has released eight episodes on Prime Video. What, as if it’s difficult?

Well, maybe it’s a little harder than anyone thinks. Elle starts off well, with Elle’s sixteenth birthday celebrations at the family mansion, attended by several of her friends, as they look forward to life as high school students thanks to Elle’s plans to manage complex social policy, secure the perfect first kiss with Hot Josh and stay on top of all the plot developments in Days of Our Lives.

Unfortunately, the best laid plans are foiled by a fouled nose and he must go out of the woods to live in the rainiest city in the United States. However, they may be down, but they are not out. Irrepressible optimism, your name is Woods. So, while father Wyatt (Tom Everett Scott) continues to make the most of his new job at a small firm less frequented by Hollywood men, and mother Eva (Jeune Diane Raphael) reworks the decor of their rental home into something a little more glamorous, Elle meets and greets her new peers. “I have two Cosmo subscriptions – one for my archive, and one I can fold. I love iced coffee, the month of July, and when people dress like tennis clothes even when they’re not playing tennis!” It doesn’t work.

Not for Elle, and unfortunately, not for the viewer. The camp effervescence on which much of the film’s success depended quickly dissipates. The new aesthetic – a screen filled with sepia, grey, and plaid camo ensembles over band T-shirts – is depressing to look at (and TV is a visual medium, so yes, it’s important) and the new characters are bland at best and, at worst, so primitively woke that you start to hate some of them when you look at them.

And the script takes a hit. And soon the film leans heavily into the simplest high school comedy scenes — the mean girl (with a secret), a love triangle, a new best friend our heroine has nothing in common, good deeds backfiring, social missteps (in a callback to the lawyers’ mixer in Legally Blonde, Elle arrives humiliatingly dressed in her underwear to an event), anonymous insults scrawled on a dresser — etc., without any new twists or enough killer one-liners to go with them. Although I did enjoy Elle’s desperation over LA gal pal Madison’s advice that the best way to come back from social death is to have a baby or join SNL. “But I’m a virgin!” Elle cries. “And I can’t wait until Saturday!”

Thanks mainly to the Woods’ family affinity (and the two pure and generous comedic performances from the adult cast that surround Minetree) Elle has enough charm to keep her going. In a world that needs all the harmless escape it can get, Elle gets the job done. But it could have been much more than that, given its proportions and the writing on the crests. It bends and surprises, and does not give up halfway.