Starring Michelle Trachtenberg, Kim Cattrall, and Joan Cusack. Unrated.

There's not a lot of subtlety to this Cinderella-on-skates story, and it lacks the sharpness of The Cutting Edge-probably still the best movie statement on the world of competitive figure skating. But Ice Princess still manages to earn a few inspirational stripes while hitting all the formula buttons. I don't know enough terminology to employ the right sports metaphors, but let's proceed anyway.

Directed by Brit-TV stalwart Tim Fywell (his only previous feature was the more complicated I Capture the Castle), the film stars ex-Vampire Slayer Michelle Trachtenberg as Casey Carlyle, a Harvard-bound high-schooler whose freeform doodling on the pond behind her house inspires a school paper on the physics of skating. (It is set in Connecticut but was mostly shot in wintertime Ontario.) This puts her in contact with the local frost queens-I mean, skating hopefuls-led by Gen (soap veteran Hayden Panettiere), a desperately driven sneer machine whose idea of "pigging out" is to get cheese to go with her bunless burger.

Gen's mom (Kim Cattrall), a near-Olympian who is obviously forcing her daughter to act out fading dreams, also runs the town's skating rink, and she quickly spots the outsider's nascent talent. This doesn't sit so well with Casey's mother, a literature professor who has impressed her child with the need to achieve everything through intellect, creating a daughter who is socially inept, despite the fabulous hair. Casey still doesn't have much trouble attracting the attentions of Gen's soulful, Zamboni-driving brother (Trevor Blumas).

The red state-blue state conflict between two blinkered single parents-one will do anything to win, the other won't bend the rules to make someone happy-is just about the only interesting subtext here. Still, the script, by Meg Cabot (who also worked on the Princess Diaries movies) and Dawson's Creek writer Hadley Davis, isn't overly concerned with fixing its characters' flaws or making them indulge in big revelations. (Cattrall's cattiness is pleasantly unrelenting.)

The skating scenes, like the family face-offs, are too stiffly blocked to be genuinely compelling, but the film is well-centred by Trachtenberg, whose face is a series of expressive circles. If this is just another having-it-all empowerment tale from Disney, at least some of it is actually attainable. And no one's knees are given the lead-pipe treatment.