First Daughter

Girls gone mild: First Daughter is a yawn-inducing daddy's girl

By Jeannette Catsoulis

You know how, when you're like really famous and stuff, and you can't ever be, like, normal? And it's just so hard to go to school and get wasted and dress like a hooker from Shaft because everyone's just so in your business? I swear, the last time I had privacy was in utero!

That last line actually appears in First Daughter, one of the most insipid mass entertainments to be visited on us in a long time. Real teenagers, of course, don't converse in these barbed one-liners, the slick locutions that the (adult) writers for "Buffy" and "Felicity" and the "Gilmore Girls'" Rory have taught us to expect from our TV and movie princesses. But with Samantha (Katie Holmes, bland as Wonder Bread), the disgruntled offspring in question, the dialogue's idiosyncracies hardly matter--all of her lines leave her mouth like suicides from the Golden Gate Bridge.

Substitute college for a tour of Europe and First Daughter is Chasing Liberty all over again. Tired of being shadowed by bodyguards, paparazzi and daddy (Michael Keaton, phoning it in from a booth in Borneo), good-girl Sam heads for college in hopes of being corrupted by movie clichés (the sassy roommate, the cute freshman adviser). Rebelling like mad, Sam--slides down a hill at a frat-house party! Dresses up in a platinum wig and white boots! Eats pizza at a carnival! If this were a Sandra Dee movie, she'd be disowned and destitute by the third reel.

But this is 2004, not 1954, and even the 12-year-old targets of First Daughter know that no one outside of a Miss America pageant these days wears a bikini and heels. Director Forest Whitaker--whose previous efforts (Hope Floats, Waiting to Exhale) reveal a high tolerance for ickiness--tries to inject a fairy tale aura with his own saccharin voiceovers, but to no avail: There's no sweetening an ending as subversively sour as a dose of medicine. Happiness, says the movie, is doing what daddy tells you; a sentiment perhaps only the Bush twins would endorse.