Georgia Byrd is the kind of character moviegoers want to root for.

She's a working woman, selling housewares in a big New Orleans department store. She's a good cook who might have become a chef, had the breaks come her way and had she taken a chance. She copies Emeril's recipes off TV, but only photographs them and gives them to the neighbors when she's done. She can't wean herself from Lean Cuisine.

She's a frugal coupon-clipper, a saver, with her own home. She sings in her church choir. And she's lonely, with only doctored pictures of the colleague (LL Cool J) she pines for in her "possibilities book." She won't approach him.

Then the cut-rate company doctor tells her she has a terminal illness, and her cut-rate HMO sentences her to death. She's about to die, and she never got around to living. So she decides to splurge and spend her last days in the poshest resort in the Czech Republic.

"Last Holiday" is a Queen Latifah movie in which the Queen hides her charisma behind an old fashioned, put-upon movie martyr. She may earn a laugh or three for all those times she casts an eye heavenward and complains, "Why me?"

But for all the goodwill the role and the lady playing it generate, the comic payoff — the dowdy wallflower blossoming when she starts speaking up, asserting herself and really living — is missing the spark that Latifah usually provides.

She's flinging money around, breathing a little life into the jet set and getting mistaken for somebody rich and famous at the Grand Hotel Pupp (pronounced like the baby swear word) when that thing the movie is missing suddenly shows up.

He's Gerard Depardieu, playing a chef who loves cooking for a woman who wants to try every exotic dish in his arsenal, and isn't afraid of fat, carbs or sugar. He curses at his kitchen staff (in French), snubs the snobs — Timothy Hutton plays a ruthless corporate raider, Giancarlo Esposito and Michael Nouri are corrupt congressmen — and charms the lady whose bittersweet secret is that she will give out at about the time her money does. He's a stitch, and the movie lights up when he arrives.

Latifah, on the other hand, despite plenty of opportunities to light up — letting her boss, airline staff and others know just what she's not willing to put up with any longer — plays it all mild-mannered and meek.

"Last Holiday" is a remake of a 1950 Alec Guinness comedy written by J.B. Priestley. Its themes, that life is too rich to not be lived in the moment, that "time is precious" and that the isolated rich could stand the occasional dressing down from the working folk, are timeless.

Director Wayne Wang, whose slow descent from "The Joy Luck Club" to "Maid in Manhattan" and now this suggests an inability to fight pigeon-holing, rubs all the edge off. No villain is irredeemable, no wrong can't be righted.

That's an uplifting message in a movie that is awfully melancholy for a comedy, and setting it in New Orleans (pre-Katrina) adds to that.

But if you're updating a classic with a charismatic star, you ought to encourage her to do a little of what made her so likable to begin with. This is a movie with lots of great cuisine, and precious little "flava."