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one star*

Screenwriter Larry Doyle wrote a first class screenplay for this movie; it’s just a shame that the cast and direction didn’t match up to expectations. I haven’t read his book of the same name, which I hear is quite good.

The movie starts well, we all get the premise of ‘dork loves prom queen’ and gets rewarded by being noticed by her. Unfortunately, the movie goes from fast action to very, very slow for long periods and never finds its pace again with the end petering out into (almost) the oblivion.

We never really believe the dork is really a dork and we never quite consider that the hot prom wild child is an authentic untamed teen. They both tend to meet someone either side of centre/normal. Okay she drives a little fast, but what 18 year old doesn’t? She threatens to be outlandish, but we don’t see her kiss the store clerk in exchange for beer or act wildly apart from taking a shower at midnight at her old school for no point other than to perhaps have her remove her clothes, but that section is about as exciting as a funeral, so perhaps it wasn’t worth it. No offence to actress Hayden Panettiere; she’s obviously good looking with a great figure. Her acting career goes back years with many television and theatre movies, but the direction for her is limp and missing in action.

I feel most sorry for the cheer leaders’ current and soon to be ex-boyfriend. He exactly matches the stereotype that this movie plays too close to. He doesn’t have a character that differs slightly from the other 5000 movies made with this theme.

There are a few laughs in the movie, but it never makes the grade expected. I say expected, because the screen play by Larry Doyle really is terrific. The lines are in there to be delivered, but the actors never manage to present them in a way that a Sandra Bullock or an Eddie Murphy would (although I grant you that those guys are too age-unrelated to play the parts in this movie, which is equally true of the actual actors – why do movies of 16 to 18 year olds not feature any 16 to 18 year olds – why are they always 22+?) You just wonder with a different direction and perhaps a different crew, whether we’d have got the movie the screenplay demanded. This doesn’t mean the team was poor, but sometimes even great teams don’t perform.

It was fairly low budget by today’s terms which means it will make money at an early stage, but at what cost to the movie ticket purchaser? The only payback we received was to hear Alice Cooper’s anthem; School’s Out. The links to other movies became more fun to seek out rather than see where this movie was going.

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