PURE LARD IN A FAT SUIT

REVIEWED - JUST FRIENDS: CONSIDER the place within contemporary popular culture of the fat suit. This unlovely piece of latex has been with us for a decade or so now, presumably as the unexpected byproduct of some abortive military research programme.

As deployed by Mike Myers and the Farrelly Brothers, the suit has become a prime signifier of the tired, the cheap and the rather bleak. A slightly jollier sub-genre sees African-American comedians such as Martin Lawrence and Eddie Murphy impersonate avuncular old folk who have piled on the pounds.

Some campaigners in the US have taken to comparing the fat suit to the blackface worn by white performers in less enlightened times. Fat people, this argument goes, are the last minority which can be laughed at and abused in this way. Which might prompt the reply that: a) fat people in the US are not a minority and: b) they haven't been restricted to ghettos or prevented from voting. Yet.

The apotheosis of the fat suit so far has been on the small screen with Friends' Fat Monica, the wibbly-wobbly, pie-gorging teen prequel to the matchstick-thin control freak of the series proper. It's Fat Monica who provides the template for Ryan Reynolds's turn here as a roly-poly adolescent who leaves his hellish New Jersey high school behind for a glamorous job in Hollywood, acquiring a buff new bod, fabulous teeth and a string of model/actress/what- ever girlfriends along the way. He, hasn't, though, left behind his unrequited passion for the cute girl (Amy Smart) who never saw him as anything except an XXXL "best friend".

Inevitably, through a sequence of events far too tedious to enumerate here, our hero finds himself stranded back in hicksville over the holiday season and embarks on wooing her at last. A series of misunderstandings, pratfalls, over-extended gags and poorly executed set pieces follows, randomly assembled by someone whose mind must have been otherwise detained at the time.

I would say you might have more fun getting your stomach stapled, but that would be unfair to skilled medical professionals, who probably provide magazines.