Armed with some of her best self-deprecating slapstick, Sandra Bullock makes Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous simply fabulous.
It's a delight from start to finish as Bullock brings her FBI agent Gracie Hart back for more high stakes highjinks.
After her successful undercover stint at the Miss USA beauty pageant, Gracie (Bullock) has become a major celebrity, which means too many people recognize her.
Her cover is blown, as we see in the opening bank robbery sequence.
Even though we know this is a comedy, director John Pasquin stages the robbery with tension and suspense and Bullock plays it for drama, not hilarity.
Both director and star know when to make that important switch, which comes when her superiors decide Gracie has to milk her celebrity by becoming the new face of the bureau.
She has to do the talk-show circuit, which means undergoing another major personality and physical makeover.
The man in charge of this seemingly impossible task is Joel (Diedrich Bader), a gay makeup artist.
Bader plays Joel just slightly over the radar, which means the laughs are on a level with the gay humour on Will & Grace.
Gracie's nemesis in Armed and Fabulous is Agent Sam Fuller (Regina King), an officer with anger management problems and a dislike for everything Gracie.
The pairing is essentially a female version of Mel Gibson and Danny Glover from Lethal Weapon, and whenever Bullock and King make this obvious the film is truly hilarious.
Reluctantly, the women become partners and are sent to Las Vegas to rescue Gracie's beauty pageant friend Cheryl Frazier (Heather Burns) and her manager Stan Fields (William Shatner).
They make quite a kidnapped pair, with Stan pleading for mercy and Cheryl trying to preserve the dignity of her reign as Miss USA.
They're so funny you long for the times when the cameras go back to the kidnappers' desert cabin.
Who would have known Shatner could be so intentionally funny?
Enrique Murciano, who plays Agent Danny Taylor on Without a Trace, is cast as Las Vegas agent Jeff Foreman.
At first glance, it looks as if Jeff is being set up as a replacement love interest for Gracie.
He seems handsome and stalwart enough, but Murciano is allowed to play his as a bit of a bumbling loser quite obviously not in Gracie's league professionally or romantically.
It's another fun twist that helps Armed and Fabulous avoid the cliches of this buddy cop genre and of sequels in general.
There are several big action and comic set pieces in Armed and Fabulous that remind us of the original, including Gracie's stint as a showgirl at a drag club.
What makes Armed and Fabulous so much fun is that it's essentially a menagerie of wacky characters brought to life by actors not afraid to make fun of themselves.
It's nonsense, to be certain, but delightful nonsense that makes us long for a few more sequels.
(This film is rated PG)
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