Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous (2005)

Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous arrives five years after a pageant comedy that had already spent its premise, and it carries itself like a film that knows the joke is finished. Sandra Bullock returns as Gracie Hart, now too famous to work undercover, conscripted into a spokesperson role she detests. The sequel's stated ambition, per Bullock herself, was to let women do what men get to do in comedies and to skip the obligatory romance. That is a real position, articulated plainly, and it gives the picture a modest spine. It is also, in execution, a buddy cop movie with a makeover montage bolted to the front.

Regina King joins as Sam Fuller, a prickly Chicago transfer who becomes Gracie's reluctant partner, and her presence supplies a Black female co-lead with genuine screen time. The screenplay never once considers what that might mean. Race is simply not a subject here, and the friction between the two women runs on temperament alone. The film's most committed set piece sends the pair into a Las Vegas drag club, where they perform Proud Mary in costume to gain entry to a dressing room. Drag queens and Dolly Parton impersonators populate the sequence as comic furniture, which is to say the material is present without being an argument.

Elsewhere the cupboard is bare. No corporation is indicted, no climate anxiety intrudes, no neurodivergent interiority is explored, and history is left entirely unrevised. A faint murmur about women succeeding inside the Bureau and about resisting a media-manufactured image surfaces through banter, never through sermon. The result is a mildly progressive artifact of 2005, aged into a curiosity. A thin vintage, poured without ceremony, and best left in the cellar.