Reese Witherspoon is a good actress.  Her talent and charisma were enough to save Legally Blonde, but there isn't an actor on this planet gifted enough to rescue her latest project, Sweet Home Alabama.  It's a painfully predictable romantic comedy with approximately zero originality, except the part where the filmmakers didn't cast Owen Wilson as the charming blond redneck.

Witherspoon (The Importance of Being Earnest) plays Melanie Carmichael, an up-and-coming designer in New York City's fashion world.  When we first meet her, she's dreaming about her first kiss (the young Melanie is played by I Am Sam's Dakota Fanning), but soon awakens to the chaos that is her first big runway show.  Luckily, it's a hit, and her JFK, Jr.-esque boyfriend, Andrew (Patrick Dempsey, Scream 3), who happens to be the son of the city's mayor (Candice Bergen, Miss Congeniality), sneaks her into Tiffany's for a memorable engagement scene.

Melanie wants to hold off on announcing the engagement, though initially we don't know why.  When she heads down to Pigeon Creek, Alabama, her ancestral birthplace, we begin to get an inkling why Melanie is acting so strangely. It turns out she's still technically married to her high-school sweetheart, former star quarterback Jake (Josh Lucas, A Beautiful Mind), a grease monkey complete with coonhound.  Melanie has made numerous attempts to finalize the divorce during the seven years she's spent in New York, but Jake has thus far refused to comply.

The tug of war between Melanie and Jake is everything you'd expect it to be, with Melanie hating his guts until the second after he signs the papers, at which time she gets that dreamy look in her eye.  The only person who wouldn't be able to see where this story is headed is Helen Keller.  Meanwhile, the more interesting part of the film (strictly by default) is the transformation city-slicker Melanie undergoes once she returns to Pigeon Creek and runs into various inbred friends and family, as well as her criminal past (as Felony Melanie).  Her accent slowly resurfaces, and her hair gets less and less chic.  Alabama's numerous scenes involving the Civil War re-enactments are a subtle reminder to us and to Melanie that you can't ignore your past.  Technically, it's not a fish-out-of-water story – it's a fish-back-into-water story, though Alabama sticks close to the formula of the former (except it doesn't make Andrew odiferous enough).

Most of Alabama's humor comes at the expense of the hillbillies (though gays and lesbians take quite a hit, as well), but in contrast with the way Yankees are portrayed, Southerners come out smelling like roses.  Everyone north of the Mason-Dixon Line is shallow and malicious, while our Dixie friends are all wacky but warm (How about that scene where they tell viewers it's okay to drive drunk, so long as someone follows you?  Even us Yankees don't do that).  All I could do was sit there and wait for the damn thing to end, while simultaneously feeling sorry for talented costars like Fred Ward (Enough), Mary Kay Place (Human Nature), Jean Smart (Disney's The Kid) and Melanie Lynskey (Coyote Ugly).

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for some language/sexual references