Lissome young Violet (Piper Perabo) has left her home in suburban New Jersey to try to make it in New York as a songwriter. She's too frightened to sing, but boy, can she write. The only problem is, she's broke. A chance encounter leads her to a pseudo-Western bar called Coyote Ugly, where the great-looking female bartenders (Bridget Moynihan, Izabella Miko and Tyra Banks) hop up on the bar and dance, in a mildly raunchy manner, for the customers whenever the spirit moves them. Their moves are mostly along the lines of country line dancing, although they do make it a point to wear skimpy tops and tight pants.) Soon enough, Violet takes a job. She feels awkward at first, but soon she gets the hang of it. Later, her stage fright is cured.

Somewhere in there she meets a nice Australian boy (Adam Garcia) and survives a crisis with her father (John Goodman). But in between, there isn't nearly enough dancing on that bartop, even though ostensibly, that's what we've dragged ourselves into the theater to see. Sure, the women talk about dancing, about how in control they are, about how much fun they have, about how much money they make. But there isn't even a whole lot of plain meat-and-potatoes gyrating. (That's because the picture is rated PG-13. But doesn't that kind of defeat the purpose?) When the women finally do get up to dance, it's mostly a melee of legs, cut so fast that you're not sure whom they belong to (not such a mystery when you look deep down in the bowels of the credits and see that all the women had dance doubles). Even with the ringers, the dancing isn't particularly salacious, nor is it even saucy or entertaining.

What's worse is that "Coyote Ugly" tries to be progressive in the way that Paul Verhoeven's "Showgirls," thankfully, wasn't. That movie was so nakedly honest about its outer-stratosphere level of exploitation that it ended up coming off as almost comically innocent. In "Coyote Ugly," there's clearly some kind of wobbly empowerment message being telegraphed, but it's so damn encoded that I couldn't crack it. Once in a while there's a moment of clarity. When we (and Violet) get our first glimpse of the Coyote girls, they've gathered for an after-work breakfast at a greasy spoon. Laughing and brandishing an issue of "Playboy," they're waving wads of cash around and placing bets on the playmate of the month's favorite movie. It's a nice touch. It's supposed to signal how unashamed they are of what they do, but it actually does a pretty good job of showing us the pleasure they take in their own sexiness and in that of other women. It's also an acknowledgement of the kind of game-playing that's involved in projecting sex appeal.

But despite the women's freewheeling giddiness about their line of work, Coyote Ugly the bar doesn't look like much fun at all. Run by Lil (Maria Bello), a 40ish tough talker who's like Mae West crossed with Debbie Harry, it's the kind of citified place where overgrown urban frat boys get to pretend they're actual rednecks, where they can hoot and holler and get beer sprayed all over them. Cheers fill the air when the Charlie Daniels Band's "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" comes on the jukebox -- it's like a Disney World redneck bar, akin to those European locales at Epcot that have been re-created so one doesn't have to deal with the messiness of plane travel and actual foreigners.

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