Quartile rating: 6.5/10 · 1 rating
Charles Price may have grown up with his father in the family shoe business in Northampton, central England, but he never thought that he would take his father's place. Charles has a chance encounter with the flamboyant drag queen cabaret singer Lola and everything changes.
Kinky Boots is a warm, crowd-pleasing British dramedy based on a true story about an unlikely friendship between a struggling shoe factory owner and a drag queen performer. The plot follows a familiar underdog/unlikely-allies template competently but without great surprise. The acting is solid — Chiwetel Ejiofor is genuinely charismatic as Lola and elevates the material — but the supporting cast is fairly conventional. Cinematography is functional and unremarkable, typical of modest British productions of the era. Novelty is moderate; the drag-meets-traditional-industry setting gives it a distinctive flavour, though the overall arc is fairly predictable. The ending delivers the expected feel-good payoff but without much emotional complexity or memorability beyond its crowd-pleasing warmth.