A seasoned showgirl must plan for her future when her show abruptly closes after a 30-year run.

‘The Last Showgirl’ is a movie directed by Gia Coppola, about an aging Las Vegas showgirl, who is forced to reevaluate her life when the long running show that she has performed in for decades is announced to be closing. She is Shelly Gardner, and she’s played by Pamela Anderson in a performance that’s garnered a lot of acclaim, with support coming from the likes of Jamie Lee Curtis, Dave Bautista and Brenda Song. It’s a slight movie, but it’s not without its merits if you enjoy seeing stories about people living on the fringes of a city like Las Vegas.

Pamela Anderson, it would be fair to say, is not an actress known for dramatic roles, but she is good here as Shelly and she is the strongest element of the movie. I don’t agree that it was quite awards worthy, but it was authentic and a lot better than I had expected her to be. Shelly is someone who has been caught up in a bubble where the show she does is granted a greater importance in her life and in general than it deserves, so she can’t cope when it ends, most likely because it shines a light on the sacrifices she made to get to this point and whether it was really worth it. She’s aided by support from Jamie Lee Curtis and Dave Bautista, who I really liked and wished we saw more off in a more understated role than usual. The plot is pretty flimsy, which is perhaps why it struggles to fill 90 minutes, and there’s not much growth in any of the characters.

Las Vegas is an intriguing place, where you have a massively glamorous centre surrounded by rundown, decaying casinos, dodgy dive bars and an air of seediness, and it’s a great setting for a movie such as this, but yet I didn’t feel ‘The Last Showgirl’ used that backdrop as well as it could have done. This past year has already featured a superior movie about aging females in the entertainment industry in ‘The Substance’, and by comparison, this one isn’t in the same league, with even a key audition scene towards the end only really making the most obvious points about how Shelly is viewed today. Indeed, if anything, it is she who is a little delusional and the casting director (Jason Schwartzman in a cameo), while mean in his delivery, isn’t really wrong in anything he says.

‘The Last Showgirl’ shows us that Pamela Anderson is a more talented actress than she’s ever really been given credit for, but unfortunately the movie around her doesn’t do as much with her performance as it could, making this only a fitfully entertaining movie that could have been better.

Rating: 3/5

Directed By: Gia Coppola

Starring: Pamela Anderson, Jamie Lee Curtis, Billie Lourd, Dave Bautista, Brenda Song and Kiernan Shipka

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt31193791/