REVIEWED - MAN OF THE HOUSE: FOUR screenwriters are credited on Man of the House, but the movie is so lacking in substance and so uncertain in tone that it reeks of compromise and desperation in its witless attempt to expand its potential audience. It begins in the style of an over-the-top thriller with big explosions and frantic chases, but these serve only to set up an ostensibly comic premise.

Five college football cheerleaders witness a murder, and gruff old Texas Ranger Roland Sharp (Tommy Lee Jones) has to go undercover as the university's assistant cheerleading coach, sharing a sorority house with the gals and buying their tampons while he protects them from the killer on the loose. Each of them is allocated a single broad distinguishing feature along with a shared obsession with diet, hair, make-up, leg waxing and mobile phones. Meanwhile, Sharp is introduced as a glum workaholic whose wife left him and whose teenage daughter tells him he was "never there".

The movie piles on the cliches as Sharp and the cheerleaders embark on a rocky road that inevitably leads to mutual admiration. When Sharp's first encounter with a literature lecturer (Anne Archer) is frosty, we know exactly where it's going to end, and the cheerleaders help out by giving him a badly needed facial and taking a leaf from Cyrano de Bergerac as they secretly prompt him through his first date with her.

Only Cedric the Entertainer enlivens the soggy, moralising material, appearing all too intermittently as a conman turned preacher who sermonises mostly in song lyrics. Jones looks suitably embarrassed throughout, as he should, given that he doubles as executive producer, although he does get to deliver one mildly amusing joke when he calls the preacher Martin Luther Vandross.