“Jessica Simpson stars in this girl-power/girl bonding comedy of an actress scorned and finds a new direction and self-esteem by enlisting in the US Army.”
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TITLE: Private Valentine: Blonde & Dangerous
DURATION: 98 minutes
DVD INFORMATION: English 5.1 Subtitles(s): English (US), French (Parisian)
RATED: PG-13 (for sexual content including references and some drug material)
COMPANY: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
Released on February 3, 2009
Directed by Steve Miner
Screenplay by April Blair and Kelly Bowe
Story by April Blair
Produced by
Costume Designer: Alex Hester
Production Designer: John Willett
Edited by Nathan Easterling
Director of Photography Patrick Cady
Starring:
Jessica Simpson as Megan Valentine
Ryan Sypek as Sgt. Mills Evans
Vivica A. Fox as Sgt. Louisa Morley
Steve Guttenberg as Sidney Green
Olesya Rulin as Petrovich
Cheri Oteri as Private Jeter
Jill Marie Jones as Johnson
Aimee Garcia as Vicky Castillo
Keiko Agena as Pvt Hamamori
Gary Grubs as Captain Greer
Jessica Simpson stars in a girl power film that went on to become a box office success in Russia and is planned for DVD release in the US on February 3rd. How does the Pop/Country singer do in her latest film?
“Private Valentine: Blonde & Dangerous” is about a film star named Missy Valentine (Simpson).
Missy lives a life where she’s tended to by her staff and is pretty much taken care of by her professional staff. May it be agent Sidney (Guttenberg) or her manager Nigel (Michael Hitchcock) who scouted her back when she was 13 and then there is a family member who helps manage her finances.
Life is not always fun for Missy. She’s always featured on the gossip magazines and followed by paparazzi and life is a bit lonely for Missy. She doesn’t have any close ties with her sister ever since she became an actress. If anything, she just has the people who work close to her , her dog and her boyfriend.
But Missy is your stereotype ditzy blonde and as she gets prepared for the premiere of her upcoming film (a film about her and a talking dog), she eventually meets up with her actor/boyfriend for the premiere but she does tell people around her that she is frustrated because she is never cast for serious roles.  And as she tries to connect with her agent Sidney, unfortunately Sidney doesn’t feel that she is up to the task to play those roles.
The night of her premiere is supposed to be a special but somehow it becomes a nightmare. While going to the bathroom, she hears her makeup artist talking bad about her and to make things worse, she catches her boyfriend having sex with her manager, Nigel. She finds out that her boyfriend was only with her to make his career look good (at the request of her manager). Then she gets a call that her relative who was managing her finances ran out with all her money and that she pretty much has lost everything.
Having no one there for her, she tries to call her sister Jinny but even she is not interested in talking to Missy. She has no one there for her.
The whole night has gone terrible. She crashes her SUV and with a bottle of wine, she drinks her sorrows away and ends up sleeping in front of a US Army recruiting office. Missy is instantly attracted to her recruiting officer and gets entranced by his words of making herself a better person by joining the Army. She signs the contact and immediately joins.
While off to boot camp, she encounters her drill Sgt. Louisa Morley (Vivica A. Fox) and Sgt. Mills Evans (Ryan Sypek) who are immediately hard on the people coming into the boot camp. For Missy, this is not what she expected the Army to be and tries to use her actress charms to win them over but it doesn’t work.
Missy eventually starts friendships with the following people:
Johnson (Jill Marie Jones) – A woman who enlisted in the Army after her husband died and is a single mother.
Petrovich (Olesya Rulin) – A shy girl who lives in a trailer park but enlisted in the Army after her brother was killed in Iraq. She is very shy and a big fan of Missy’s movies.
Vicky (Aimee Garcia) – Seen as a gang banger but Vicky enlisted in the Army to get a job to help pay for medical school. She also has problems with her boyfriend who keeps telling her that being away from her for so long, he has many opportunities to mess around with other women.
Hamamori (Keiko Agena) – A woman that comes from a family of men who has enlisted in the military but has an infatuation with marijuana (for medicinal purposes).
But because Missy is not to happy with her life at bootcamp, she does what she can to get thrown out. She’s wakes up late, she doesn’t show up in time for morning call, she’s defiant but each time she fails in training, she lets down the whole unit and automatically gets them all punished by forcing the whole unit to run many miles or having to do all this work because all Missy is thinking about is herself. And it’s getting on everyone’s nerves so badly that Pvt. Jeter (a former sgt. who is re-enlisting after a nasty divorce) has threatened Missy that she will beat her if she continues to hurt the unit.
So, when agent Sidney and her lawyer try to visit Captain Greer (Grubbs) to get Missy out of bootcamp, Sgt. Morley tries to have her off the boot camp because she’s become such a distraction. But the Captain feels that it could hurt the Army’s image if an actress is kicked out of bootcamp, he refuses to kick Missy out. Thus Missy will have to finish off bootcamp.
But as Missy continues her lazy and frustrating ways that hurts the unit, will her new friends at the boot camp continue to support her?
VIDEO & AUDIO:
“Private Valentine: Blonde and Dangerous” is featured in 2:40:1 anamorphic widescreen. The video quality is fine at the most part but some areas tend to showcase quite a bit of grain.
As for audio, audio is presented in Dolby Digital 5.1 and as much as the music became clear, I don’t recall any use of sound utilized specially on all channels. If anything, this film is dialogue-driven. But you can hear the audio clearly through your front channels.
SPECIAL FEATURES:
The DVD features two major features.
The special features two deleted scenes and the other is “The Making of Private Valentine: Blonde & Dangerous”, a nine minute featurette.
If anything, the making of featurette is quite interesting to watch. You get to learn about the challenges that the ladies faced by filming in the South, especially the insect bites courtesy of mosquitoes and chiggers. So, each talent is interviewed in regards to working in high humidity and being in the swamp where insects, alligators and moccasins and other things could be. But for a lot of these ladies, the experience to play such a role and get dirty, was an exciting experience for them. Interesting is that interviews were made with all major talent and the main actress, Jessica Simpson is not featured in the featurette.
“Private Valentine: Blonde & Dangerous” is at most part a girl-power, girl bonding film. It’s entertaining but at the same time, there are just so many segments that I was quite disappointed in.
For one, for a military film, to see Jessica Simpson’s long hair looking like it’s getting in the way was surprising. Her hair was not in a bun and not even cut short for her role. But I’ll let that sly, there are just a few things that made no sense in the film.
Men and women are typically trained separately but they are trained together during basic training in this film.  Also, if one had to run three miles multiple times a day because of a person’s inability to follow the rules, I can not see how this unit would tolerate for that long. Even if she was an actress, I can not see a unit constantly being punished to be so lax with Missy Valentine. I was actually waiting for a character (one of her friends) to stand up to her and really be furious and ticked. If anything, these women kept to themselves and really had no bite towards how Missy was handling things.
There is another scene when Missy and her friends can not sleep and some are experiencing menstruation cramps and all are craving chocolate. So, Missy steals keys to a locked room and together they break into it and steal chocolate and they sit down and each start to eat it in an orgasmic type of way. The ladies then have a girl-bonding moment.   They never really get busted, but I can expect this from a summer camp film but a military training base. I can’t imagine this happening.
One of the segments that just doesn’t make any sense was when Missy believes she’s seen Sgt. Morley (Vivica A. Fox) before. Eventually, she saw her in an old film in which she was an actress. So, to spite her, during a training video to be shown to the trainees, someone slips a film of Sgt. Morley’s old acting segment and everyone has a great laugh (except Morley who desperately tries to turn the film off). I felt that there was no need for this segment in the film.  How would they even obtain this film from the outside world? Paparazzi? I felt it was so unnecessary.
Obviously, the screenplay by April Blair and Kelly Bowe was meant to be a simple girl-power/girl-bonding popcorn flick but the pacing and unnecessary segments puzzle me because this is not something I would expect to come from director Steve Miner (known for classic comedy hit “Soul Man”, the hit Mel Gibson 1992 dramatic film “Forever Young” or horror films “Friday the 13th” Part 2 and 3). Â There are quite a number of problems with the storyline but you kind of have to just sit back and just enjoy it for what it is and not to take it too seriously.
But outside of the girl bonding, there is a somewhat of a budding romance as Valentine and one of her training sergeant’s tries to boost her confidence and realizes that these people at the boot camp are closer to her and together they work as a team and they really listen to her. So, she starts to have a change of heart with the military and wanting to make things right. So, there are positive and redeeming moments for the character of Missy.
I’m sure one can find comparisons to the 1980 Goldie Hawn film “Private Benjamin” which also features a ditsy blonde trying to find a new direction in her life by enlisting in the US Army but as that film had substance, entertaining as “Private Valentine: Blonde & Dangerous” was in certain parts, it lacked substance.
I guess with some aspects of the film, I was entertained and if you are in the mood for a popcorn flick on DVD that will make you laugh, something not too serious and a bit campy, then definitely give “Private Valentine: Blonde & Dangerous” a try.