Hannah Montana: The Movie

Billy Ray Cyrus’s performance in this sporadically amusing if spirit-drainingly formulaic Disney musical recalls the comedian Bill Hicks’s claim that he’s ‘a jar-headed, no-talent cracker asshole’. It’s true that as an actor, Cyrus is about as expressive as a black sack full of splintered cricket bats. His monumental awfulness, though, is not enough to ruin the movie, and that’s all down to the whip-smart comic energy of his daughter, Miley Cyrus, as gangly high-schooler Miley Stewart, who secretly moonlights as mega-selling tween popstrel Hannah Montana. The story, such as it is, sees Miley spirited away from the phoniness of Tinseltown  and back to her birthplace in rural Tennessee where she’s forced to endure jug-band hoe-downs, the longing gaze of an unfeasibly gorgeous farmhand and granny’s hackneyed old-timey witterings. While Cyrus’s droll performance (Miley’s not Billy Ray’s) deserves better material, this is still amply entertaining.