Violet (Piper Perabo) leaves New Jersey for New York to pursue her dream of becoming a songwriter but ends up working at a dive bar in this 2000 drama they should have called A Barmaid is Born.

Like Forrest Gump before it, Coyote Ugly has popularised a real restaurant chain and aged like fine shrimp. It resembles an MTV reality show set in a bar, neglecting to develop any characters or a story, and has one song (Can’t Fight the Moonlight) that’s essentially a slowed-down rip-off of Barbie Girl by Aqua. The film plays out like a trashy version of Burlesque without the musical numbers, and there is no ‘save the venue’ plot because that would require a venue to be worth saving.

Despite deserving to be condemned for crimes against health, safety and fashion, the eponymous bar supposedly has constant round-the-block queues of men apparently too shy to go to a strip club. This might make more sense in a small town with only one dive bar to drink/fight at, but this is New York City where you could presumably find the same atmosphere in any number of venues or car parks.

Coyote Ugly falls between several barstools, since it’s not exactly a drama, comedy, musical or stripper movie, though it crams elements of all four into its snakeskin trousers. It simply exists as a time capsule of the Girl Power era in pop culture, when women were really only good for dancing on bars or making sure the useless men in their lives remember to put on socks. For all its wannabe raunchiness, Coyote Ugly ends up looking naive, and any nostalgic enjoyment in watching it comes more from seeing how far we have come than what we have lost.