AH, London, city of open-top buses, rhyming slang, red telephone boxes by the Cutty Sark, stately homes with huge grounds and a policeman on the gate, market stalls on the South Bank, and young, clean-cut musicians just waiting to be discovered at nice, clean hostels. Well, if that's what Hollywood wants for What A Girl Wants then that's what the American girl abroad will have.

Welcome to their London, not our London, for a typically patronising Tinseltown twist on Cinderella in the English capitol, in a make-over movie so riddled with clich that it is enjoyable, if only in a jaw-dropping way. Little princesses will love it as a slumber party-movie to replace The Princess Diaries.

The 'girl' is New Yorker Daphne, played by Amanda Bynes as an air-brushed Avril Lavigne, and she is a hip Chinatown teen who leaves a note for her Bohemian mum, rock chick Libby (Kelly Preston), saying she has left New York to find the father she has never met.

He just happens to be Lord Dashwood, once a biker in leathers with a thing for Indian travel, but now Colin Firth in another of his awkward aristocrat roles, and here looking only slightly less bored than Ralph Fiennes in Maid In Manhattan. Henry Dashwood has a London pad even bigger than Buck House and still has a wild, independent streak that has seen him resign his seat in the Lords to pursue his ambitions to be an MP.

Libby turns up at his door, encountering the Ugly Sisters of the piece, Dashwood's humourless fiancee (Anna Chancellor, in another of her Duckface turns) and her stuck-up daughter. Libby is, naturally, a breath of fresh American bubblegum, soon to bring some reality to this dusty pile with its aged staff and unnecessarily large rooms.

If all that America-knows-best attitude is galling, there is one saving grace. You can't help but smile at the clash of the naughty and the haughty as director Dennie Gordon sends up English restraint. Don't embrace, says Henry's mother; we English reserve affection only for our dogs and horses.

Updated: 09:29 Friday, August 08, 2003