Film - Fabulous shoes and Britflick cliches save more northerners, writes John Lyttle Kinky Boots (12A)

There's a one-word compliment that drag queens pay other female impersonators whose attitude they respect, and that one wonderfully revealing word is "fierce". And if nothing else about the down-at-heel comedy Kinky Boots is fierce, Chiwetel Ejiofor is. Playing the transvestite cabaret artiste Lola, Ejiofor looks like a bull dyke Diana Ross and has perfected a walk somewhere between a wiggle and a forced march. Lola wants to be glamorously feminine but his father trained him as a boxer, so he's the butchest bitch on the block: he strides when she wants to glide. The girl can't help it. Muscles bulge from the splashy red-sequinned numbers Lola favours while belting out such handbag dance classics as "Together We Are Beautiful" at the Angel club, and, no matter how spray-gun-thick the foundation, our heroine casts a long five o'clock shadow.

When we first glimpse Lola, the soused Midlands shoe manufacturer Charlie Price (Joel Edgerton) is staggering to his rescue, which later seems the best - I'm tempted to type only - joke in the picture. It's not as if Lola is trying to pass as a real woman, but those Shirley Brassy outfits are his armour, the kabuki demon make-up his mask. Sighted in a civvies outfit of sweater and jeans, he resembles nothing so much as a turtle prised from its carapace: fleshy yet obviously unfinished. When Lola is heckled on stage by a stag party, however, the mask melts and we witness the iron maiden suddenly struggle for the right stinging words. It's there and gone in a blink, but it is still a study in fear, hurt and panic, and Ejiofor does it all with his eyes. Well, with his eyes and about a tanker load of Elizabeth Arden Volumising Double Density Mascara. What a career: one day you're starring in Dirty Pretty Things, the next you are a Dirty Pretty Thing. Is this the same actor currently pretending to be a vicious gangland boss in Four Brothers and about to essay brilliantly the coolest of cerebral assassins in the sci-fi epic Serenity? The characters have nothing in common except their audacity.

Ejiofor's performance forces you to forgive a lot. "From the producers of Calendar Girls," the posters boast, so no one can say they haven't been warned. Kinky Boots is about how Lola and Charlie save his factory and salt-of-the-earth workforce by switching from sensible brown suede to shiny leather gear: from brogue to vogue, as it were. The shoes are handmade. The movie is prefabricated. The opening sequence of the child Lola dancing on the seafront in red stilettos? Billy Elliot. The climactic scene in which Charlie humiliates himself on the catwalk in pinstripe jacket and scarlet waders? A copy of Hugh Grant with guitar at the school concert in About a Boy. The idea of making your own, rather outrageous employment when there's no work to be had Oop Grim North? The Full Monty. The single Brit hit of recent years that Kinky Boots does not borrow wholesale from is Brassed Off, probably because that would oblige the film to be overtly political instead of archetypal Blair-era product.

Globalisation is what is putting Price & Sons out of business, but Kinky Boots stomps past that fact sharpish. It has to. It is desperate to crack the American and other foreign markets: Kinky Boots is what globalisation is about. Thus the film charts its own bland Third Way, equating Feel Good with Not Giving Offence. Here is a script indebted to fetishism, yet there is not a whisper of anything remotely erotic in its 106-minute running time. That might rattle cages, and the director Julian Jarrold and writers Geoff Deane and Tim Firth don't want to alienate any niche - not gays, blacks, cross-dressers, nor those unfortunates who have to live in Northampton. So Lola is told that folks in the provinces aren't as liberal as the jaded sophisticates in London, but never really encounters bigotry, apart from the cross looks of an unreconstructed male, Don (Nick Frost), and that is soon remedied with a little light arm wrestling and Oprah-speak. The script doesn't even show enough nerve to have a boo-hiss villain, unless you count the estate agent eager to transform the Price factory into luxury flats.

Kinky Boots is so full of the milk of human kindness, it almost moos. Foolish contrivance follows foolish contrivance to furnish the impression of drama. Will the workers down tools before the big Milan show, even though such madness will permanently deprive them of employment? Duh. Will Charlie needlessly humiliate Lola and then apologise by saying he's a better man than he'll ever be? Of course. Because, since Rupert Everett in My Best Friend's Wedding, gays have gone from campy sidekicks to life coaches for heterosexuals whose lives now lack the old certainties and have to be assembled as they click-clack along - a way of existing that most minorities are only too familiar with. It is open to question whether this is a promotion or patronisation. What isn't is Kinky Boots parading like it's a pair of Manolos - how did that title sneak past the Trade Descriptions Act? - when it's as safe and sensible as Scholl's.

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