You've entered this page to read about a stewardess movie. So obviously you've been wondering: Is there a dance number? With the recent success of musicals in Hollywood, perhaps someday tap dancing will be a part of every film. However, until then, at least View From the Top had the sense to relegate its salsa stepping number to the closing credits.
Somewhere in the midst of Mike Meyers outrageously floaty eye is a grown up satire waiting to get out. It never really makes it and Meyers vision problems are quickly beaten down as we journey into the exciting and pointless world of outrageously over-pampered stewardesses. Our guide is Donna, a painfully cliché small town girl who surrounds herself in the trappings of hickdom, complete with viciously loud spandex skirts and unnecessarily excessive piles of hair.
With hope in her heart and perk in her breasts, she takes a job as a stewardess for a low budget airline, where she's forced to wear latex-like dresses and service on broken down gamblers. Dissatisfied, Donna seeks more and risks... uh whatever it is that she has... to work her way up in the airline industry. Her goal? International First Class on Royalty Airlines, see the world and settle for nothing but the best.
View From the Top is a poorly written plane crash loaded with ideas and one liners ripped off from the school of standardized script writing. There is nothing endearing or interesting about any of these characters. Even if there were, no one would notice through thick green fog of bad acting emanating from nearly every person involved. Meyers provides the only comedic respite in this humdrum little mess, but even his scatological stylings quickly wear thin.
To compensate, Director Bruno Barreto threw in some celebrity cameos, peppering the film with has-beens like Rob Lowe and the overrated old bag who used to play Murphy Brown. Obligatory chick fights are substituted for emotional growth and narrative voice over is thrust in between the cracks to glue the more sketchy details of this very thin story together. Isn't Paltrow supposed to have an Oscar? Shouldn't she be able to come up with something better?
The thing is, View From the Top desperately wants to be Sweet Home Alabama, a much better film about a small town girl running away from the constricting world of moderately rural life. But Gwyneth has none of the simple sweetness and charm that Witherspoon seems to posses and this script is clueless when it comes to life anywhere outside New York. In the end, I suppose this local girl makes good, but her success is anything but admirable and her revelations about what she's left behind are almost pathetically predictable.
