Bring It On

It's kind of funny to realize right before the movie starts that you're the oldest person in the audience. This realization has never happened to me before, and I knew that it meant something about the movie I was about to see. Of course, I already knew what it was: this movie is aimed directly at teeny boppers with raging hormones. The young females in the audience were looking for a spunky lead character looking for love and an eventual triumph. The guys were just looking for some old fashioned booty shakin'. If you've ever been to a high school football game, you know that it is a cheerleader's primary objective to be as sexually flirtatious as humanly possible. This movie features everything discussed above. But, I wasn't prepared for the real entertainment value in witnessing these items on the big screen.

Bring It On could never have survived as just a cheerleading team's road to victory. That would be too cliché and too boring. Of course, the film does have the obligatory fall from greatness and the difficult struggle back to the top. When Bring It On succeeds, its capitalizes on the stereotypes that we've all developed in our mind about cheerleaders: every smile is fake, they're "dancers who have gone retarded," and that any guy cheerleader is gay. It's rare when a film actually treats guy cheerleaders with humanity. Thankfully, Bring It On does.

The script is, for the most part, surprisingly witty, although it does have its clunker lines ("My entire cheerleading career has been a lie!"). Most of the dialogue is sharp and precise, and often has a nice satirical edge to it. The first five minutes, in an obvious dream sequence, are perhaps the best in the film. It's a cleverly choreographed dance scene with outrageous cheers. With that triumphant opening, you realized which direction the director would take with the story.

Kirsten Dunst is appealing to the eye but has never been much of an actress. She always has the spunky, cute roles. In Bring It On she has the spunky, cute role. She's so typecast now that it'll be hard to imagine her in any other type of role. Luckily for the film, she succeeds at it, giving her most enduring performance to date. She does plenty of prancing around in her cheer outfit cut at the midriff and parading around campus in clothes that nobody without a huge bank account could possibly own.

The first half of the film moves along briskly. During the last half, however, it takes a dive. The script seems to lose its focus and it begins to concentrate more on the budding relationship between Torrance (Dunst) and the newcomer to town played by Jesse Bradford. This decision takes our attention away from the cheerleading competition that is to become the eventual climax. With the focus shifted from what we had become to care about, the climax loses much of it's impact. Instead, it becomes just another part of the story, leading up to a predictable conclusion.

Bring It On did entertain me more than I thought it would. I thought that I would be the victim in our group of watchers but it turns out that I liked it better than any of them. With a film based on cheerleading, you've got to look beyond the silly appearance of the story and examine what the director really intended. In this regard, Bring It On does a pretty spotty job, but still managed to entertain our packed theater audience pretty well.

On a scale of 1 to 10 pom-poms : 6