It's all about Helen Mirren. Fine and foxy and oh-so dreamalicious, that's what Helen Mirren is. She's fifty-eight years old, but still in great shape, and she carries a fiery glow, something that cuts through the stillness of everything around her and casts the mind into daydreams about exchanging respectfully provocative whispers over glasses of good wine.

I'm sorry, but that's just how it is. And watching Helen Mirren carried me through a lot of Calendar Girls, which is sometimes a fun movie, sometimes a stupid one, but never drifts far from Mirren. The director, Nigel Cole, wants to keep things ever so slightly this side of bland and obvious. He wants to make a risqué movie -- benign and sheepish, but kinda risqué all the same. Mirren has respectability these days, on top of great talent and that liberated, rebellious sort of charm. With her as his lead, Cole can cover the base of credibility and still make a work of geriatric safeness.

Because, you know what type of movie this will be before you even go in. It's the easiest type of Britflick to make successful, an all-smiles crowd-pleaser that follows the Full Monty formula and gets the middle-aged all excited. There will be a transparent mix of sadness and laughs, with jokes that flirt with sexual innuendo -- to an extent that would make your mother laugh and throw a guilty smile at the naughtiness of it all, but never actually gamble at specialized humour or anything that could be called offensive.

Some of these movies work. The Full Monty was a masterpiece, I think, and Cole's own Saving Grace had enough little surprises to let me call it good and not feel like a sap. Calendar Girls has the right kind of story for a movie that could get a passing grade -- it's about a bunch of ladies from the Rylstone Women's Institute, who in 1999 posed for a nude calendar to raise money for the local hospital after one of their husbands died from leukemia. Nude, but with their naughty bits covered up by objects, while they went about such typical WI activities as jam-making and flower-arranging. The project would be pointless if it didn't have a wink about it.

There are a lot of laugh-out-loud moments early in the film, as the women bicker amongst themselves and wonder whether they're doing the right thing and get all embarrassed about taking off their clothes. But the laughs drift away, and the flaws stick, like the ridiculously nervous photographer who comes on board for the shoot. Dilemmas that get blown out of proportion for manufactured drama, like when Mirren's husband gets misquoted in the tabloids or her son gets arrested for smoking oregano. And there are moments that are desperate for a laugh, because Cole and his screenwriters don't really know how to do this story justice.

Look at the scene where the girls are about to go off to America, where publicity about the calendar has spread. They're in the airport. The girl behind the desk says there's something wrong with their tickets. Everyone pauses suspensefully, and Julie Walters gets in a strop about how they're supposed to be booked on the flight, and this is ridiculous, and they need to get on that plane. And then -- huzzah! -- the girl smiles! The heroes are not to worry, she says, and their tickets were only incorrect because they've been moved to first class!

There's a lot of stuff like that. And we never get to see the original calendar, not even in the end credits. And because the filmmakers are busy sticking to formula, very little screen time is spent on the photo shoot, where much of the real humour and emotion was probably laid bare in terms that could easily have been cinematic. And the drama in the closing passages is a debate about staying focused on the meaning of the project, rather than getting greedy or becoming wowed by fame -- ironic, in a movie so happy to exploit real life for cheap and easy commerce.

Calendar Girls places itself in a tradition of films that are fairly easy to make, look like they're doing a professional job and still end up failing. It goes on too long, misfires too lamely and doesn't really know the heart of its own story. But at least there's Helen Mirren.

(Released by Touchstone Pictures and rated "PG-13" for nudity, some language and drug-related material.)

Review also posted at www.ukcritic.com.