Miss Congeniality 2
| State of body | Unseen. |
|---|---|
| Detail of inspection | Never inspected. |
| Forensic Investigator | shellshear |
| Comments | I didn’t dare to view the body. Instead, in a radical and unethical departure from the usual procedure, I have reconstructed it from my vague memories of the first film. |
This evening, I am departing from my usual forensic procedures. For a start, I haven’t actually seen “Miss Congeniality 2”. I was aware of the accident – I heard the sirens - and I know a little of the body’s condition from Mr Winston, the attending surgeon on the evening that she was brought in.
“It’s not pretty, Mr Shellshear,” said Mr Winston. “But I’ll spare you the details. Frankly, I don’t think they’ll be any surprise to you.”
I had a full caseload at the time. These were in the heady days of “Alien vs. Predator”, when it took all my skill, and that of the police and the mortician and the undertaker and a great deal of assistance from the family, to even find all the pieces of the body. “Miss Congeniality 2” sounded like a far simpler case, a typical sequel suicide. Someone got greedy, and someone got hurt. Just like always. I passed on it, and took on the exquisite corpse of “Hulk”, and there went a year of my health and sanity, lost to my own greed and ambition.
But that’s all blood under the table now. The slab is clean and waiting, and I find myself thinking back to that day I decided not to view the body. Sure, I could consult the files and find out for sure, but I’m afraid. I have dreams that it might not have been so bad, and why spoil that with the no-doubt messy, sordid truth?
Well, I have a little to go on. The first Miss Congeniality was entertaining in an unambitious way, an adequate vehicle for Ms Bullock to be beautiful and goofy. That would surely have been the primary aim of the sequel, too. And I heard that in the sequel, she had been relegated to public relations for the police department, being now too conspicuous for undercover police work. It’s a fair enough assumption to make, but must have been a real headache for the scriptwriters. Imagine being told to copy the first film as closely as possible, but not being allowed to have the main character work undercover! How could they possibly duplicate the main plot points of the original, thus getting squillions of dollars? They would surely have had to do something different; to strike out with an entirely new plot. Risky!
The first and most obvious thing to do would be to call the sequel “Mr Congeniality”, and have Sandra in male prosthetics and makeup for the duration of the film. Ah, how I smiled as I imagined the scriptwriter who came up with that one! In my fondest dreams, he would first get to present the idea to Sandra, who would nod thoughtfully and then crush his testicles with a garlic press. No, if we wanted Sandra to be presented with another Miss Congeniality crown in the sequel, we would have to have her in another contest of some sort, and the only thing that would make any kind of sense these days would be a reality TV show. That is, that she would be a contestant in a reality TV show made entirely up of B-list celebrity women who would be fighting over a B-list celebrity man.
We open with a crime in progress. Sandra is there, in disguise as a man (thanks to the efforts of our first screenwriter - no screenwriter’s efforts are completely ignored), but she gets recognised anyway through an unlikely set of circumstances. The whole thing gets messy, as they are wont to do in the beginning bits that end with the hero being chewed out by the Sargent for screwing up. In this case, she wasn’t even supposed to be on the case, but was not coping well with being a publicity woman for the FBI. She quits altogether, and we cut to a few months later, in which she has devolved to some primal being banging empty pizza boxes together in her apartment. She has broken up with her boyfriend, and we have therefore hit the requisite low-point in her character arc. And we’re only five minutes in!
She gets a call from one of her friends (let’s call her Lucy, since I don’t remember any of the actual character names) from “Miss Congeniality”, who has gone on to be a runner-up in Miss World, which qualified her as enough of a B-list celebrity to get onto the international reality TV show “The Man”. Lucy is one of the more particularly ditzy and nice contestants – extremely friendly and quite bright, but very, very ignorant. She wants Sandra to come onto the show as well – Lucy has been receiving death threats from a stalker (we see scenes involving the death of a pet), and she needs someone she can trust nearby her. And, as it happens, Sandra is quite the B-list celebrity herself (but, she says to the scriptwriter, I’m really an A-celebrity, right? Maybe my character should be too?) and the angle is irresistible to the producers: she’s in.
So we get the transformation again – from slob to desirable Sandra – and again, the angle is that Sandra is doing only what is necessary to get the job done (help her friend) while keeping that aspect secret from everyone. If the producers got wind of the threats, they’d kick them both off, to avoid complications in the show. But every time she’s alone, this time, the smile fades from Sandra’s face. She’s still completely down, lost and adrift without job or love. For Sandra, this film is about rebirth.
Meanwhile, we are introduced to the premise of the show. A whole lot of single B-list women from around the world (and the gimmick: cast as many real single B-list celebrities as possible) compete for the affections of a B-list man, and it’s all live, no tricks or fake-outs. Celebrity marriages are enough of a commodity that the prize is, in fact, marriage, and the audiences are responsible for eliminating contestants. And “The Man” is a big enough show that there’s no need for further prizes: the fame, for the celebrities, could even push them into A-list. Ben & Jennifer 2: this time, you see every second from the beginning.
Sure, it’s insane. But the marketing has great figures for it, and that’s enough for everyone concerned. Sandra and the other contestants gather, and wow, it’s a bit of a bitch-fest at first. There’s back stabbing right from the beginning, and Lucy ends up in tears over some of it, while Sandra gets her hackles up. All of it ends up in the promotional footage for “The Man”. It’s going to be big: the international phone-in charges for voting are expected to cover the cost of the production.
The show starts. There are a variety of challenges and contests in order to impress and/or get time with The Man, many of which are celebrity-based – singing contests (eg. love duets with The Man), acting contests (screen tests against The Man), etc. The Man turns out to be a perfectly likeable celebrity – he’s genuinely the love interest in this film – but to start with, he gets off on completely the wrong foot with Sandra. She isn’t really interested in him. She’s trying to protect her friend. But he’s more and more intrigued by her. All the other celebrities are doing their damndest to win him over, and she’s almost indifferent.
And then, there are the accidents. It’s lucky Lucy has Sandra to look after her, because there really are a couple of scary close calls (perhaps a near-car-crash, and a few less serious incidents more aimed at making Lucy look bad in front of the cameras). Sandra starts to suspect that one of the contestants might have been involved in the stalking and harassment, perhaps to keep Lucy off the show. Sandra would be perfectly happy for Lucy to leave the show (and herself too) but for one thing: The Man. Lucy doesn’t just want to compete. By the time the detective work has gotten this far, they’ve already done a couple of the contests, and spent some quality time with The Man, and Lucy really likes him. She wants to win and marry him, and she thinks he feels the same about her. Sandra thinks she’s delusional, but will go along with it. And Sandra is flattered by The Man’s interest in her, though she refuses to admit it.
To cut a long story short, the contestants gradually get eliminated. Lucy stays on because she’s sweet and The Man likes her, and she’s not as dumb as she sometimes acts. And Sandra stays on because people find her quirky and funny: she does her Miss Congeniality schtick. And The Man still likes her. There’s still peril in the background – Lucy is continuing to be threatened (and Sandra even suspects The Man himself at one point, causing hilarity to ensue) – but eventually, the bitchy contestant who they think is responsible, is eliminated, and they relax.
Lucy has a huge fight with The Man over Their Future. She is a goodwill ambassador for an unspecified African country, and has done a great deal of good work there in promoting world peace (the running gag from “Miss Congeniality”.) And she wants to go back to Africa and continue to push for peace. She has already donated a huge amount of her own earnings to the country, and is much-loved there (in fact, given that they can call in and vote on this program, she has always received a large number of votes from them!) but The Man wants the celebrity gravy-train that will follow the finale. The way is clear for Sandra to win if she wants it.
But she doesn’t. She thinks The Man is being an idiot about it. She recognises that he is really in love with Lucy, and convinces him to crawl back to her. Sandra voluntarily leaves the show, in a rather noble way. She’s grown through this experience.
And this is where we get the big climax. As it turns out, the bitchy contestant wasn’t responsible for stalking Lucy. And neither was The Man. In fact, it was war-mongers from the country that Lucy has been promoting peace in. She’s more popular than even the President there.
They don’t want to kill her – that will only turn her into a martyr. They tried to scare her off, and when that didn’t work, realised that reality TV could work to their advantage. If Lucy were made to look foolish or incompetent or evil, her popular support would evaporate. All the attempts against Lucy on the show were of that nature. In the climax, Sandra is relaxing with the other contestants, watching footage of the show, and realises that there is only one person who could be responsible for organising these sabotages. She runs for it. Meanwhile, we see Lucy and The Man having dinner in a swanky restaurant. The Man has a deathly shellfish allergy, and she has (unknowingly) eaten shellfish, and she’s about to kiss him…
So Sandra barrels in (Embarrassment! She was kicked off, and now she’s interrupting the champions’ dinner!) and stops the kiss, saving the day. This last plan was to make it look like Lucy murdered The Man (having not forgiven him for their last argument) or at least, killed him through negligence. But who was responsible? Sandra turns and faces the only person left who’s been with them all this time: The Cameraman. He has been responsible for every bit of nuance - the close-up of Lucy eating the shellfish, cutting to her looking sinister - basically, everything that makes her look bad.
And we see, from the point of view of another cameraman, Sandra facing off against the cameraman (who we’ve never seen before, of course). He runs for it, still wielding the camera, and there’s a chase on live reality TV, as he hijacks the TV van and drives for it, chased by Sandra. Live cameras everywhere. It’s a ratings bonanza. Everybody watches the TVs as the chase happens just outside. And they’re still glued to the screens during the last Murder-she-wrote confession-extracting confrontation between Sandra and the cameraman, where Sandra has a camera of her own.
We conclude with Lucy and The Man’s wedding. Sandra is talking with one of the other ex-contestants, and reveals that she has started a celebrity private detective business. We pull back to show that she is the first bridesmaid, and other contestants from “The Man” are the other bridesmaids. They’re in their last competition: catching the bouquet. She fights the rest of them off with a certain degree of aggressiveness. Sandra has her mojo back.
Ah, that ending always brings a tear to my eye. I know it’s not a particularly brilliant plot skeleton – but it ought to do. There are many things you could do with a sequel, but with a film as light and frothy and “high concept” as the original, you want something that is an interesting variation on the original theme. And I think we’ve managed that.
But for this autopsy, perhaps it’s best that I didn’t get any blood on my hands. The transition from mind’s eye to film can be a harsh one.