She’s All That

Directed by Robert Iscove, She’s All That follows Freddie Prinze Jr.’s Zack Siler as he attempts to transform a deeply unpopular student (Rachael Leigh Cook’s Laney Boggs) into the school year’s prom queen as part of a bet. It’s a fairly ludicrous premise that is, for the most part, employed to tedious and surprisingly interminable effect by Iscove, as the filmmaker, working from a script by R. Lee Fleming Jr., delivers a sluggish comedy that contains few, if any, elements worth getting excited about or interested in – with this vibe certainly exacerbated by a proliferation of deeply unsympathetic protagonists and periphery figures. (This is especially true of Prinze Jr.’s bland and oddly smug central character.) There’s little doubt, certainly, that the leads’ palpable lack of chemistry goes a long way towards perpetuating She’s All That‘s pervasively wrongheaded atmosphere, and it’s clear, too, that scripter Fleming Jr.’s ongoing emphasis on eye-rollingly inept instances of comedy, including a pointless gross-out scene wherein a bully is forced to consume his own public hair, does little to alleviate what is, for the most part, an entirely obnoxious endeavor – with the hopelessly anticlimactic finale ultimately cementing the picture’s place as a thoroughly repugnant teen-oriented piece of work. (And this is to say nothing of the reprehensible decision to give Laney’s brother hearing aids for the sole purpose of turning him into an object of sympathy.)

* out of ****