Trailing negative buzz and a revolving door of A-list talent since its inception in 1994, Diane English's pudding-soft remake of George Cukor's wicked 1939 satire of Manhattan socialites isn't so much incompetent as it is hopelessly tame and muddled. The Women has all the visual glamour of a suburban rummage sale. It doesn't help that an annoyingly girlish Meg Ryan — in the Norma Shearer role as Mary, a contented Connecticut supermom shaken to her core by the news that her husband is having an affair with a Saks "shpritzer girl" (Eva Mendes, subbing feebly for Joan Crawford) — has had so much facial work that her features are immobilized. (And this in a movie that sucks whatever laughs it can muster from the Botox subculture.) Notwithstanding Annette Bening's wispy gossip, there's not a bona fide double-talking vixen in the entire coven, and before you know it, The Women has shrunk to fit the sewing form of a television movie whose heroine is briefly floored by adversity before rising from the ashes with a little help from her loyal BFFs. Cripplingly sensitive to its market potential, The Women covers every possible female demographic base, another dismal chick flick after a summer full of them.
