It's amazing what the open range can do for your complexion.


You'd think that the merciless sun, the rattlesnake diet and the time logged in a frontier brothel would take the sheen out of a girl's hair. But Andie MacDowell, Mary Stuart Masterson, Drew Barrymore and Madeleine Stowe -- the rampaging heroines of "Bad Girls" -- manage to stave off all the ill effects of the American West and look absolutely fabulous.


Eileen, Anita, Lilly and Cody flee their small-town brothel to prevent Cody (Stowe) from being hanged. Her crime, ? la "Thelma and Louise," was shooting a client who was assaulting Anita (Masterson). So the four women gallop off across the country, also ? la "Thelma and Louise," to stake a claim in the Oregon territory.


En route, the four outlaws are put through their Old West paces, updated by the very '90s gender switcheroo. During the course of their action-packed escape, the cowgirls apply the same spunky defiance to posses, gangsters and male-biased land laws.


With "Bad Girls," director Jonathan Kaplan has fashioned a revisionist primer on the early American frontier, and on the Western genre itself. The film bends over backwards to update the mythic cowboy story by adding Chinese settlers, black cowboys and sexist oppression to the landscape.


It's a project worth tackling, since Westerns have routinely miscast the American frontier as a social equalizer. But Kaplan overloads on exposition -- he whomps you over the head with liberal-artsy authenticity.


When one character gazes out onto the moonlit rangeland, turns to another and says, "The population of the United States is over 63 million people now," you want to pull out a pen and note it down in your three-ring binder. It might be on the exam.


The most regrettable thing about "Bad Girls," though, is that Kaplan's revisionist project loops back into a standard-issue exploitation film. This is a big disappointment coming from the man who directed 1992's "The Accused."


When he's not slipping in vignettes about the legal oppression of women, Kaplan does his best to keep Drew Barrymore in a push-up bra. Despite the fashion constrictions of armed flight across the continent, the four actresses seem to change outfits in time for every rollicking bout of gunplay.


Moreover, Kaplan has lined up actresses too good to be used as mounted mannequins.


As the gritty Cody Zamora, Stowe supplies some excellent scenes opposite Robert Loggia and James Russo, who play her ruthless former lovers. And Masterson plays the widowed Anita with integrity in the few scenes that allow it.


But what with the gangster subplot, the Pinkerton detective subplot, the two romantic subplots and all those costume changes, none of them has the margin to show what they can do. You end up wishing there was even one character with as much dramatic range as Andie MacDowell's hair.





"Bad Girls" is playing through Oct. 20 at the Americom House of Cinema in the Radisson-Slavjanskaya Hotel. It shows Monday to Sunday at 7 P.M. Tickets are at the twilight special price of $5 (in rubles) or $5 by credit card.