Nancy Drew

'Oh, think yow." That's what the latest version of Nancy Drew says whenever somebody hands her a biscuit or compliments the modesty of her decolletage. "Think yow." There's something about those pinched, small-town American vowels - not to mention the ironed hair and gleaming knee socks - that urges you to run at the juvenile detective with oily hands and push her into a cowpat.

Nancy Drew **

Directed by Andrew Fleming. Starring Emma Roberts, Tate Donovan, Laura Harring, Barry Bostwick, Josh Flitter, Craig Gellis, Rich Cooper, Rachael Leigh Cook PG cert, gen release, 99 min

The film-makers do, it must be said, make various half-hearted attempts to poke fun at the clean-living perkiness of their heroine. Played with abrasive vim by Emma Roberts (daughter of Eric, niece of Julia), this Nancy Drew has spent her early years skipping around the sort of terrifyingly clean town that David Lynch enjoyed skewering in Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet.

When her dad moves to Los Angeles, she finds herself propelled into another, more recent Lynch entertainment. The spooky mansion the Drews rent was, it seems, once owned by a long vanished movie star, played (in flashback and archive footage) by Muholland Dr's Laura Herring. Putatively thrilling consequences result from Nancy's researches into the disappearance.

Nancy Drew is, to be fair, a great deal less noisy and garish than most contemporary teen entertainments. But the picture can never decide quite how snarky it wants to be about its source material. Nancy's anachronistic wardrobe and disconcertingly courteous demeanour suggest that the director is aiming for a pastiche in the manner of The Brady Bunch Movie. Yet the subplot involving a tragic single mother would be more at home in an episode of Cracker or NYPD Blue.

It ends up as a heterogeneous mess that is likely to bore adults and confuse their offspring. No think yow!