IT WAS commonplace in the early decades of US TV for sitcoms to carry a sugar-coated moral message for teen viewers. That was usually delivered towards the end of shows such as Father Knows Best(soon to be a major motion picture), My Three Sonsand The Donna Reed Show. In Hannah Montana: The Movie, the message is laid on with a trowel from the outset.
Post-tween readers may need to be advised that Hannah Montana is a singing 16-year-old superstar, the alter-ego of schoolgirl Miley Stewart (played by Miley Cyrus). When Miley dons a blonde wig, nobody spots that she and Hannah are the same person, as happened whenever Clark Kent put on his glasses and somehow disguised his remarkable resemblance to Superman.
The movie opens on excited fans streaming and screaming their way into one of Hannah’s concerts. Just before she takes the stage, her tut-tutting widower dad Robby Ray (played by Miley’s dad, Billy Ray Cyrus) tells her it’s her turn to do the dishes that night. Her pushy publicist (Vanessa Williams) is ecstatic that Hannah is offered a slot at a music awards event in New York, but Robby Ray solemnly reminds Miley that she agreed to attend the birthday party of Grandma Ruby (Margo Martindale) back home in rural Tennessee.
Robby Ray doesn’t complain when they travel there by private jet, but he does insist that Miley spends a fortnight rediscovering “a normal life” in the sleepy town where, to Miley’s horror, everyone gets up at dawn.
Unexpected compensation arrives in cute cowboy Travis (Lucas Till), who went to school with Miley and now looks like an Abercrombie Fitch model. Travis suspects that she’s “gone all Californian on us” and, despite his youth, he’s given to such folksy philosophising as telling Miley that life’s a climb but the view is great.
When a greedy developer (Barry Bostwick) plans to turn Main Street into a shopping mall, Grandma Ruby is outraged and organises a fundraising event to oppose the plan. This provides the perfect excuse for an extended concert sequence in which Hannah blends hip-hop with hoedown and leads an elaborately choreographed line dancing routine. And that is the raison d’être of this labouredly wholesome and entirely inoffensive romp.
