If you’re a Hayden Panettiere fan, you probably watched this movie, and maybe you enjoyed it.
If you’re not particularly a fan of hers, I’m not entirely sure how you would stumble across this movie unless you saw it on the shelf of the local video store and somehow thought it looked interesting.
This movie could have been good. Somewhere along the way, there were two main failures:
1 – the choice of the two main male actors
The lead male role in this film, Denis Cooverman (Paul Rust), is supposed to be a moderately awkward guy who spends some time with the head cheerleader and tries to warm her affections towards him over the course of an evening involving crazy situations. The secondary male role of Rich Munsch (Jack Carpenter) is a character whose sexuality comes into question due to a comment in Cooverman’s valedictorian speech at their high school graduation, and you spend the entire film with almost all the characters questioning whether or not he’s gay. The choice of actors for those roles should’ve been switched. Paul Rust and his portrayal of Denis seems far more appropriate to have been cast as Rich Munsch. The way he portrayed Cooverman, I found it hard to believe that Beth Cooper would find him endearing at all. She might feel bad for him because of the things that happen to him during the course of the night, but he’s far too awkward and uncharismatic to feel like he even has a chance with her. Jack Carpenter played Rich Munsch as an awkward-yet-likeable character, but I didn’t question at any time during the movie whether or not Rich was gay – which I can’t say about the Denis character (who at times didn’t even appear to be attracted to Beth Cooper). There didn’t seem to be any chemistry between Paul Rust and Hayden Panettiere, and I wonder if that would’ve been the case with Carpenter in the lead role.
2 – the decision to make it “cartoony”
Whether it was Beth Cooper’s driving skills (which I’m convinced would’ve resulted in either her death or her license being revoked far before graduation) or any scene with Beth Cooper’s militant boyfriend, I found various parts of this movie to be too “cartoony”, to the point of being lame. At least twice during the movie, my wife and I questioned why no one called the police, and only once was the possibility even remotely mentioned. The reasoning for why the police weren’t called was sorta lame. Tone things down a bit and the movie could come across as less “lame” and more “qwirky”.
I definitely wouldn’t recommend watching this one. I would recommend a remake, were they to re-cast at least two of the roles and change up the script (even just a little bit). As it stands now? Failure. Not EPIC failure, but a failure nevertheless.
