Studio: Twentieth Century Fox
MPAA Rating: PG-13
If I have to attend one more high schol prom this year, I'll scream. Drew Barrymore's new flick, Never Been Kissed, brings us another entry in the seemingly endless parade of proms, smart kids vs. cool kids, and budding teen romances. Laid over this stratum of cliches is the superficial story of a newspaper reporter, Josie Geller (Barrymore), who goes undercover at a local high school for a feature story. Along the way, she (all together now, class) discovers herself and falls in love. With a teacher, no less, appealingly played by Michael Vartan. And he with her, even though he thinks she's 17. How creepy is that?
"Josie Grossie" wants to vindicate her first high school life as a geek, but she immediately falls in with the school nerds, The Denominators, led by one of the most talented teen actors in the business, Leelee Sobieski. (They're so nerdy that they go to the prom as a double helix of DNA.) To meet her editor's (John C. Reilly) demand to hang with the cool kids, Josie turns to her slacker brother (David Arquette), who operates a Hawaiian-themed mail depot.
How easy is it to get into this high school, anyway? Apparently, as easy as it is for Arquette, who looks older than Barrymore, to pass for her younger brother, and then pass for a 17-year-old.
That's the most obvious absurdity in a list of absurdities: Garry Marshall as an off-his-nut editor-in-chief; Molly Swanson as the office slut with cottage-cheese thighs; Josie ignoring a hot story on cool kid hangouts (complete with sex and booze); Josie finally getting accepted by the cool kids; Arquette's romance with a 16-year-old (even creepier than the Vartan-Barrymore student-teacher thing); and the incredibly sappy, self-indulgent feature piece (not the hard news story she was assigned) that Josie produces by movie's end.
Three bits I liked: Barrymore's slapstick run-in with a school door (credit Home Alone 3 director Raj Gosnell for that); the entire nightclub sequence; and the prom theme (famous couples).
Barrymore co-produced the movie -- while she's not solely to blame for how Never Been Kissed turned out, she needs to exercise better judgment in the future.
RATING: *1/2
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