Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous

Sandra Bullock reprises her role as the klutzy FBI agent who went undercover at a beauty pageant in 2000’s Miss Congeniality, only there’s no pageant this time, so the title doesn’t make much sense. Then again, neither does Marc Lawrence’s script. Bereft of original ideas, it resorts (as the “armed and fabulous” subtitle suggests) to the same slutty drag-queen campiness that scuttled Legally Blonde 2, coupled with an unusually blatant succession of plugs for fashion designers and Las Vegas casinos. Bullock gets two new sidekicks: Regina King as a bodyguard-cum-partner and Diedrich Bader as her mincing makeover artist. Bullock, King and Bader all have their charms, but the slapdash script stretches them much too thin. John Pasquin’s direction is clumsy and slack, belaboring unfunny gags.