St Trinian's

This ultra-glossy, twenty-first-century update of the original series of films about the anarchic student body of the titular ‘ladies school’ comes bounding off the screen like a feature-length ad for Top Shop. Out go any radical notions of female social upheaval and in come clumsy drug jokes, broad stereotypes and reams-upon-reams of thudding pop music. The lead performances from the young cast are generally weak (apart from an excellent Jodie Whittaker) and the script is a tiresome mulch of self-conscious cultural references. Not even a camp-as-Christmas turn from Rupert Everett as effete headmistress Camilla Fritton is enough to salvage this mess, which drifts aimlessly towards a tawdry heist finale that will only make sense to those with the ability to bump their own brain-patterns to the level of sub-moronic torpor. The one-dimensional, any-excuse-for-a-musical-montage direction does, admittedly, inject some much-needed zip into the proceedings, but in terms of a cultural legacy, this is one to file next to ‘Spiceworld: The Movie’.