Miss Congeniality

Year: 2000

Country: USA

Tagline: Unpolished. Unkempt. Unleashed. Undercover.  »

Plot: The film opens at a school where a boy is picking on another. We see Gracie Hart as a child who beats up the bully and tries to help the victim (whom she liked), who instead, criticizes her by saying he disliked her because he did not want a girl to help him. She promptly punches the boy in the nose and sulks in the playground. We go forward in time to where Gracie Hart (Sandra Bullock) works for the Federal Bureau of Investigation with Eric Matthews (Benjamin Bratt) as a Special Agent. We see her on a mission where she does not follow orders from her superior and tries to stop their target from choking. Because of her actions one of her squad gets shot. She is put on a desk job. The bureau receives a threat against the 75th annual Miss United States beauty pageant in San Antonio, Texas from notorious domestic terrorist "Citizen". Eric is elected to lead the mission to stop a supposed attack. A computer search identifies Hart as the female FBI agent best qualified to go undercover as a contestant (as Miss New Jersey, the original having quit after she was discovered to have been in a porn film), although she pays little attention to her femininity. Beauty pageant coach Victor Melling (Michael Caine), whose reputation was ruined after his last contestant criticized his methods, teaches the tomboyish Hart how to dress, walk, and act like a contestant. She is unused to such behavior, however, and sees the pageant and its participants as "outdated and antifeminist". Several suspects exist, including competition director and former pageant winner Kathy Morningside (Candice Bergen); her unpleasant son/assistant Frank Tobin (Steve Monroe); veteran emcee Stan Fields (William Shatner) who, like Morningside, is to be soon replaced by a younger person; and Rhode Island's Cheryl Frasier (Heather Burns), possibly a radical animal rights activist. Representing New Jersey as "Gracie Lou Freebush", Hart impresses the audience by playing the glass harp and by later demonstrating self-defense techniques during a talent demonstration, when the other girls drink out of the glass harp. She unexpectedly becomes friends with Frasier and the other contestants. When Citizen is caught elsewhere, Hart gives up her badge and gun in order to continue the pageant investigation alone. Just as Matthews is going to board the plane back to the bureau, he works out that Hart's suspicions were correct. Hart surprises everyone, including herself, by becoming runner-up to Frasier. The agents discover that Morningside and Tobin have been secretly impersonating Citizen due to her old grudge against the contest, and prevent them from murdering Frasier with a bomb in the title tiara. Hart's fellow contestants choose her as Miss Congeniality, and she starts a relationship with Matthews.An FBI agent who goes undercover as a beauty contestant to thwart the efforts of a terrorist threatening to blow up the Miss USA Pageant.

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