Bring It On, set in the Lolita-esque world of high school cheerleading, threatened to be one of those mindless, wretched, cliched teen flicks we all love to hate.
What a surprise!
While it occasionally careens off course into predictability and veers dangerously close to icky territory because of the sexual innuendo and obligatory locker room scene, Bring It On is both smart and funny enough to score high grades.
The characters are well developed, the dialogue is often sharp, the observations about high school life are wry and the acting ensemble led by Kirsten Dunst delivers in the crunch.
What is missing is irony. After all, this is a movie about high school cheerleading. It could have been subtly savaged.
Regardless, Dunst (Interview With A Vampire, Dick, The Virgin Suicides) plays the new captain of the Toro cheerleading team at Rancho Carne High School in San Diego.
Her world is shattered when she finds out that the previous captain had stolen all their championship routines from a hip-hop team at an inner city school in East Compton. The race is on to re-make their routines and salvage their pride.
At times, the movie turns into a booty call contest between the mostly white, blond, rich-bitch chicks from San Diego and the black, raven-haired, poor-folks girls from the L.A. ghetto. Hollywood is obsessed with racial divisions and Bring It On makes it even more obvious by packaging the differences into skimpy little outfits and giving it all a sexual spin.
That's tiresome, but at least director Peyton Reed, working from former hip-hop critic Jessica Bendinger's screenplay, does not overplay the race card here.
Each team is allowed to keep some dignity and the two team captains -- Gabrielle Union plays Dunst's East Compton counterpart -- show some classy behaviour in an exchange before a major cheerleading contest. That way, the movie is allowed to evolve into something different and better.
Meanwhile, there is a quirky romantic subplot involving the retro-rock 'n' rolling brother (Jesse Bradford) of Dunst's newest cheerleading recruit (dynamo Eliza Dushku).
Bradford stands out, especially for fans of Canadian movies. Eerily, he looks like a young clone of Don McKellar (Last Night, Twitch City). He even communicates some of McKellar's bemused cynicism, making him infinitely more interesting than most of the callow pretty boys who inhabit these roles in teen romantic comedies.
I don't want to overplay this flick. It's not Citizen Kane. Hell, it's not even Clueless. But it does have a clue about the world it portrays and manages to make it fun for audiences.
(This film is rated PG)
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