Alison Lohman (l) stars as Katy McLaughlin and Tim McGraw as her father, Rob, in the contemporary drama, 'Flicka'. - Contributed

(AP):

Her girlishness intact at 27, Alison Lohman stars as a spirited teen who tames a spirited horse in Flicka, a paint-by-numbers update of Mary O'Hara's children's book My Friend Flicka, previously filmed in 1943.

Lohman acts like an eternal youth as 16 year-old Katy McLaughlin, who names the wild mustang she adopts Flicka, Swedish for 'pretty girl'.

The 'pretty girl' analogy is played to the hilt in this new version that changes the sex of O'Hara's young male hero. And in case no one notices how pretty a girl Lohman is as she rides along, the flimsy characters in Mark Rosenthal and Lawrence Konner's script miss few chances to tell us how pretty she is.

After a solid debut with 2004's thoughtful character piece A Home at the End of the World, featuring Colin Farrell and Robin Wright Penn, director Michael Mayer is stuck with stick figures of the Western spirit on Flicka.

Lohman's Katy is a dreamy homebody who would love to just hang around her family's Wyoming ranch and play with the horses. For no clear reason, her father (country singer Tim McGraw) wants his little darling to get out of Dodge, go to college and do something else with her life.

As the story opens, Katy comes home for summer on the verge of flunking out of her costly boarding school. Katy and dad immediately start dueling over her future, while mom (Maria Bello) and brother, Howard (Ryan Kwanten), play referee.

Then Katy finds a wild mustang wandering the mountains around the ranch. Katy connects with her Flicka, but her father thinks the mustang is dangerous (characters constantly remind us "that horse is truly loco") and wants to sell it to a rodeo promoter.

Deceptions

The filmmakers pile on storms, angry words, deceptions and a mountain lion that appears at just the right moments to punctuate the relationship between girl and horse and girl and dad.

Cinematographer J. Michael Muro, who also shot Kevin Costner's Western Open Range, captures some gorgeous panoramas of plains and mountains. But for his syrupy musical score, Aaron Zigman sounds as if he borrowed licks from every western he's ever seen.

The dull dialogue and predictable action corrals the actors. Lohman's blandly cute and mischievous, but her character at times seems as loco as Flicka, Katy's mildly demented air clashing with the sweet family tone the filmmakers aim for.

This is strange turf for Bello, a queen of dark, edgy films such as The Cooler and A History of Violence. Bello manages to infuse some warmth and sly humour, but her character is just another of Hollywood's superficially written moms.

After a worthy film debut as a nasty dad in the football flick Friday Night Lights, McGraw is tightly reined in Flicka, keeping a dull stone face even in his testy confrontations with Lohman. McGraw mugs through a climactic close-up alongside Lohman with such self-consciousness he looks like a smirking cowboy about to break into song in a country-music video.

In fact, not long after, he does break into song over the closing credits with a tune titled My Little Girl - a sign of the happy trail down which "Flicka" is headed.