Iron Jawed Angels relies on a disappointingly conventional script, one that delivers stock characters who have no dimensionality, and simplistic plot abbreviations that you'd find in a high school textbook.

The film celebrates freethinkers who made huge personal sacrifices to wage a critical battle for human rights, yet it does so by bowing to commercial orthodoxies and the meekest modern notions of womanhood.

Gussied up with a comically anachronistic use of period music on the soundtrack and flashy, MTV-style montage sequences, pic misguidedly strives - but ultimately fails -- to belie its instincts as an assembly-line movie-of-the-week.

It's good to be reminded in an election year how hard and long women fought to win the vote.