# Bring It On (2000)

### reviewed by
Ron Small

    BRING IT ON (2000)

    Grade: C+

    Director: Peyton Reed

    Screenplay: Jessica Bendinger

Starring: Kirsten Dunst, Eliza Dushku, Jesse Bradford, Gabrielle Union, Clare Kramer, Huntley Ritter, Tsianina Joelson, Nicole Bilderback, Rini Bell, Ian Roberts, Richard Hillman

BRING IT ON is CLUELESS for those who felt that particular movie was too leisurely paced. Akin to much of the current teen dribble being ladled on audiences like so much cheese, it moves at a rapid MTV-ized pace, its camera hardly able to keep up with the fast walking pretty actors as they speedily deliver the latest (stylized) teen lingo ("Dyke-a-delic!" a teen princess squeals). And it's one of those flicks where every scene commences with the blasting of some current top 20 hit, its volume rising depending on the tenor of the scene, or some times just rising for the sheer hell of it. Like most teen-pop fairy tales it takes place in a posh high school that looks more like a heavenly resort than even the ritziest private school. And it happens to be populated by a gaggle of muscular, runway-ready hunks and obviously silicon-enhanced honeys. Come as it has during the dog days of August, BRING IT ON may just be the best back to school commercial ever made. But as a feature length film its merits are more questionable. The flick centers on the trials and tribulations of a cheerleader squad populated by the usual sexy, valley girl\porn star types. Meaning that all major set pieces revolve around hyperbolic cheerleading routines in which the girls smile brightly and cartwheel about, hinting, not so subtly, at their coquettish sexuality while pulsating techno and alterna-rock attempt to energize the audience into feeling something…anything.

(Am I the only one who finds cheerleaders a bit on the creepy side? With their false ear-to-ear grins and programmed sunny disposition they remind me of female clowns, manic-expressives not so much having a good time as laboriously trying to create the illusion of F-U-N)

BRING IT ON reminds me of one of those 70's Roger Corman exploitation pics (BIG DOLL HOUSE, CANDY STRIP NURSES) but unlike those this one finds itself confined to a PG-13 rating, though it obviously would prefer to be R. Included are several scenes that feel very soft core pornish. There's one in which the bikini-clad cheerleaders sexily grind up against cars, soap dribbling from their taut flesh, sexual innuendoes involving antennas abound, in other words, a bikini car wash scene approved to unspool before the glazed eyes of many thirteen year old boys.

Much like most of the Corman pictures, BRING IT ON even tries to sneak in a bit of a social message amidst all that jiggling. We find that the bratty, affluent (read: white) cheerleaders have been stealing routines from a bunch of tough, inner city (read: black) cheerleaders. As is to be expected this is embarrassingly explored with even less insight than one would find in an average AFTER SCHOOL SPECIAL, but I suppose the movie had to be about something.

BRING IT ON demonstrates to us cynical types that cheerleaders have consciences too, with its plucky heroine, Torrance (Kirsten Dunst playing a bright eyed combo of her dopey teen caricatures in DICK and DROP DEAD GORGEOUS) scrunching up her face and exclaiming "It just isn't right!" No it isn't, and this bleeding heart even goes out of her way to make things right by pleading to her well-off father to puhleeze sponsor the inner city cheerleaders for the inevitable cheerleading competition (wonder of wonders, such a thing really exists), victory be damned.

A myriad of sub plots find themselves scrunched in between all the mid-riff baring; Eliza Dushku (BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER; the show, not the movie) is the sarcastic rebel chick who shows up at the very end of one of those goofy [cheerleading] audition scenes where each candidate is more inept and clueless than the proceeding one. Dushku is, at first, sniveled at for her punky appearance but she regales the crowd by leaping and flipping like a deft ninja. Despite the show she puts on, the preppy cheerleaders still hate her, but nonetheless let her into their little cult, for it would be plain rah-rah retarded to deny her Olympic-like athletic ability. She has a brother, Cliff (Jesse Bradford, giving us little more than a slanted smile) who cozies up to Torrance in the film's second best scene which has them brushing their respective teeth in unison, bizarrely trying to one-up each other with the amount of foamy toothpaste they can spit up.

The best scene is the one where, after reluctantly hiring a choreographer, they meet the psycho. Played with sniveling malice by Ian Roberts, the guy is like a wacky drill instructor, barking orders and insults ("Cheerleader's are dancers gone retarded") rather than offering anything resembling guidance. Roberts is so good, he just about steals the movie in only about seven minutes of screen time. That should virtually guarantee him some odd MTV MOVIE AWARD nomination. At the center of it all is Kirsten Dunst, who I've liked before. Here she comes across as something of a young, sickly sweet (and phony) Kathie Lee Gifford and that's not a good thing. I'd call her caricature clever if I wasn't so damn annoyed by how one-dimensional it is. Better is Eliza Dushku, the cynical one, who at least doesn't call attention to herself. Most of the cast seems to have learned their acting style from repeated viewings of SAVED BY THE BELL, which actually serves them just fine in a picture such as this.

By the end, at the aforementioned cheerleading competition, the film has degenerated into a series of interchangeable routines, made even more interchangeable by the director's constantly flinching camera; the entire finale looks like a cut and paste job. And then there are the victors who should be fairly obvious once you realize the film is as guilty and liberal as its impossibly pert heroine. But the film makers sure try hard, giving us some fun teen dialogue ("Do you speak fag?"), a bit of unnecessary projectile vomiting (I thought SCARY MOVIE was supposed to be next door) and a surprisingly well placed fart gag. Roger Corman would have a ball. As would his grand kids.

http://www.geocities.com/incongruity98 Reeling (Ron Small)

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