Whatever It Takes

Things are getting pretty bad in Hollywood when you see a GenY comedy remade with a GenZ cast. What's next -- Haley Joel Osment as Willy Loman? "I see salespeople."

Following in the footsteps -- very closely -- of last year's prom comedy She's All That, where shallow richkid Freddie Prinze Jr. feigned depth in order to get cute bohemian Rachel Leigh Cook to accompany him for one last painfully over-important ritualistic high school social function (spring 1999 brought at least four such promedies), comes this. In which a braindead jock pining for an artsy Molly Ringwald lookalike cons her best guy-friend into giving him the inside track in exchange for helping that guy get together with the prep supermodel of his dreams (played by Jodi Lyn O'Keefe, who was almost exactly the same character in She's All That). Throw in the friends/lovers/neighbors element from Melissa Joan Hart's Drive Me Crazy, a few crotch knocks from "Funniest Home Videos," girls who twist their hair a lot, a healthy dose of Cyrano de Bergerac, the rejected-circle-of-dorky-friends subplot from She's All That (and Drive Me Crazy, and Never Been Kissed), and the retracting-dance-floor pool scene from It's a Wonderful Life, and what you've got is the next generation of TV starlings vainly hoping to make a bigscreen splash.

Apparently all but one of the adults in this movie fled town, hopefully leaving Darwinism to run its course. But though I waited dutifully, the scene in which all the unsupervised kids have sex and give birth to carnivorous mutant babies that eat everybody at the prom never materialized. Instead the only parent to be found, "Saturday Night Live" alumna Julia Sweeney as the boy-next-door's school-nurse mom, gives a birth-control pep rally that looks more like a Beastie Boys concert, including the gigantic phallus.

What else can be said about a movie whose entire plot is summed up in the script line, "Chicks dig assholes"? other than, all I could think about the whole time was getting home for a dinner of tasty, cold leftover pizza. D-


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