From the archive: "Honey"

Bille Woodruff's Honey constitutes a star vehicle for Dark Angel lead Jessica Alba as urban Mother Teresa figure Honey Daniels, nightclub waitress, professional dancer, and vital exponent of adult education: "I teach Head-Pop at the Centre," she says, just so you know. Judging from Miss Alba's extraordinarily compact midriff, Honey could also teach the world how to get one's internal organs into the tiniest space possible, but that's a side issue. Honey believes The Children Are Our Future; that we should teach them well, and let them lead the way. But she faces the unwanted advances of predatory men ("Every guy's a director if he wants some booty") and pressure from an overbearing mother who'd rather her daughter gave up the Head-Pop and took up ballet instead, presumably on the grounds she knows what ballet actually is.

When Honey starts to take the music video world by storm - with dance routines inspired by basketball (!) and skipping (!!) - you realise the filmmakers have hit upon a perfect response to those jaded old critics who insist all films these days look like music videos by making a film consisting almost entirely of music videos, lip-glossed and choreographed to within an inch of its pretty little life. This doesn't stop Honey from being hilariously rubbish, with only about the fifteen worst songs of last year on the soundtrack, and R 'n' B "stars", the microphone boom, and several of Hollywood's favourite conscientious insincerities competing to rack up the most cameo appearances in any given scene.

(March 2004)

Honey 2 opens nationwide - in cinemas! - from Friday. Contain yourselves.