Space Cadet review – Emma Roberts joins Nasa in lazy

There are shades of Legally Blonde and Private Benjamin in Amazon’s lesser, low-rent comedy about a Florida bartender with dreams of being an astronaut

There’s a well-tested, and mostly well-liked, formula being recycled in Amazon’s lightweight Fourth of July comedy Space Cadet. It’s the mildly rousing story of an underestimated blonde excelling in a more serious field, something Goldie Hawn aced in Private Benjamin and Protocol before Melanie Griffith took over with Working Girl and Born Yesterday, followed by Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde (the less said about Jessica Simpson’s two under-the-radar attempts, the better). It’s an easy, against-all-odds rise for us to get behind and a career-defining every-scene showcase for an actor who may have also found herself unfairly undervalued by the industry.

There’s something for both actor and character to prove, and when it’s done right, we should be able to taste the same hunger, cheering for an inevitable victory. But in the writer-director Liz W Garcia’s blandly cobbled together attempt, one will have trouble tasting much of anything. It’s another cheap and poorly made category-filler, the kind that makes you want to reconsider how many streaming subscriptions you’re paying for, a grim, plasticky reminder of what so many films look and feel like now.