Review of Stick It (2006) by Markb. — 19 Jun 2006

The title of this adolescent-in-more-ways-than-one girls' gymnastics movie is, of course, a double meaning. In addition to its obvious use as a sophomoric insult, it's a gymnastics term meaning to complete a difficult routine by landing and staying on your feet as opposed to your knees, hands or butt.

Sadly ironic, then, that Jessica Bendiger's movie about the subject spends so much time falling on its face! The plot (stop me if you've heard this several hundred times before) deals with a perpetual screw-up who gets another chance, learning from her new teammates and coach the value of Team Spirit.

Well, the movie certainly smells like team spirit, and Bendiger knows her territory (note how parents here refer to a certain end-of-school-year event as THE prom, while the kids drop the article) but all of her characters are astonishingly cruel and unlikable, her writing unforgivably sloppy (she has a character speak fluent malapropism about half of the picture's length, then abruptly drops the gag) and she recycles that regrettable but audience-massaging teen-movie tactic that made John Hughes a very wealthy man in the 1980s: When In Doubt, Blame The Parents For Everything.

Surprisingly, Bendiger wrote the definitive movie in this genre six years ago: the surprisingly terrific little cheerleader movie Bring It On, which among its many other excellences featured a near-brilliant opening-credits sequence that brought all the standard stereotypes about cheerleaders out into the open, allowing the rest of the movie the freedom to dispel them by showing just what hard work cheerleading really is.

And it finished with a genuinely exciting, thrilling cheer competition, which you'd think Stick It would at least have the good sense to duplicate. But no...at the precise moment you WANT this movie to be predictable, and allow us to enjoy some competitive gymnastic footage, Bendiger suddenly up and decides to go all polemical, and turn the film into an expose of unfair judging practices.

..which may indeed be justified, but the protests that ensue rob us of even the incidental climactic pleasures of the tritest of sports dramas. (Perhaps the movie's countercultural twist is what attracted Jeff Bridges, whose skill at script selection is normally impeccable, to this.

I certainly can't think of any OTHER reason!) Other than noting how much the promising lead actress, Missy Peregrym, looks like Hilary Swank (and how much Gia Carides, playing her mother, resembles an older Courteney Cox), there really isn't much to enjoy here on any level: Bendiger in her directorial debut tries to compensate for the many deficiencies in her script by employing lots of speeded-up motion and other annoying MTV techniques (to say nothing of a headache-inducing soundtrack), but, as her movie's announcers are fond of saying during The Big Meet: "Consistency is more important than flash.