Grade: C-

Verdict: When Reese goes South, so does the movie.

Details: Starring Reese Witherspoon, Josh Lucas and Patrick Dempsey. Directed by Andy Tennant. Rated PG-13 for sexual content and language. One hour, 42 minutes.

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DVD Review:
"Sweet Home Alabama," with the plucky Witherspoon caught between not only her down-home Southern roots and New York chic but also between two very different men, also has an alternative ending on its DVD. As many of the Georgia extras who took part in the filming already know, the original ending was changed. And for good reason — it would have been the dumbest conclusion to a movie in decades.

Director Andy Tennant reveals how test audiences derailed at least one supporting player from the final film. And on his commentary track, he often talks positively about filming in Georgia and describes specific locations.

None of this makes "Sweet Home" a better movie. It's still a flighty, often clichéd Southern comedy bolstered by the very talented Witherspoon.

One more thing: Tennant does claim that his film's reference to a "bologna cake" is authentic. He says his co-writer's wife makes it with layers of bologna slices and cream cheese. The concoction is topped with olives.

It sounds like a perfect description for his movie, too.

— Bob Longino, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Theatrical Review:
Not since Daddy fell in the still and the outhouse collapsed on Li'l Brother have I seen anything like "Sweet Home Alabama."

Did I hear dueling banjos at the screening? Or was that Jethro and Elly May arguing near the cement pond? Apparently, everyone connected with "Sweet Home Alabama" heard something like that during production, because this dismal, wrongheaded romantic comedy makes "Smokey and the Bandit" look like "To Kill a Mockingbird."

Melanie Carmichael (Reese Witherspoon) is in the Manhattan fast lane. She's an up-and-coming fashion designer who lives in a sooooo cool downtown loft and has just become engaged to Andrew (Patrick Dempsey), son of New York's mayor (Candice Bergen, asked to recycle her stale "Murphy Brown" routine).

Now all Melanie has to do is go back to her hometown, Pigeon Creek, Ala. (a Li'l Abner name if I ever heard one), and take care of a few things — like getting a divorce from Jake (Josh Lucas), the redneck hunk she married in high school. The two haven't spoken in years but are still legally hitched (as we say in the South).

Jake decides to give Melanie a bit of a hard time because she's giving him and everyone else she grew up with (including her parents, Fred Ward and Mary Kay Place) a megadose of New York attitude, which in this film is almost as grossly exaggerated as the Southern stuff.

Granted, the movie means to be fluff. But, c'mon, do director Andy Tennant (who made the wonderful "Ever After") and writers Douglas J. Eboch and C. Jay Cox really think Ward would be going on about "baloney cake"? Or that the only person in small-town Alabama who knows who Calvin Klein is would be Melanie's deeply closeted best friend, Bobby Ray (Ethan Embry ... and, I swear, his name really is Bobby Ray)?

The movie is generally doltish, but it can be funny. In one scene, Melanie goes looking for her daddy and stumbles into the finale of a Civil War re-enactment. Walking through a field of casualties, she asks where he is, and the corpses, being nice Southern boys, one by one rise from the dead to help point him out.

"Sweet Home Alabama" could use a lot more of that sort of thing. It's a good joke because of the situation, not just because these guys like to dress up like Confederate soldiers. The joke would work if it were set at a "Star Wars" convention or a tourist-trap re-creation of Custer's Last Stand. The movie wants to have it both ways — for us to laugh at these crackers and yet find them more genuine, more endearing than the Yankees. It's like something Julia Roberts might've rejected around 1991.

So why would Witherspoon, one of the most gifted and sought-after actors around since her one-two punch, "Election" and "Legally Blonde," choose to do this? She's created a niche for herself, playing hilariously un-self-aware characters — dynamos who often don't know what they're doing, but keep on doing it.

But Melanie is self-aware, to a certain degree, and acting like a JAP cliché — yes, that's what they've written her as — isn't appealing. She's not self-absorbed, as in the previous films; she's a snob. We're supposed to like her because she's Reese Witherspoon, because Jake still loves her and because her daddy calls her Sugar Bean.

As for the supporting players, Ward and Lucas come off best, mostly because they manage to give their characters down-home dignity.

Ward is especially good as a blue-collar version of Tom Skerritt's laid-back but loving dad in "Steel Magnolias," while Lucas is just cute enough and just likable enough to deserve a better break in a better movie.

Fittingly, a Georgia girl named Jen Apgar, who has about two scenes as Jake's date the night Melanie comes home, is one of the best things onscreen. She's how acting in the movie "Sweet Home Alabama" should've been.

— Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution