If you've recently graduated from high-school and want to revisit the days of cheerleading - and who doesn't - Bring it On is the movie for you. If you want to see a good movie, well, just skip this one. With the main focus being a cheerleading rivalry between two different squads - one from San Diego, the other from L.A. - culminating in an epic showdown (please note that this whole review will no doubt be filled with sarcasm), there isn't really anywhere this movie can go but straight down.
I realize that I'm not the target audience for this flick (as evidenced when teens started pouring in to fill the seats left vacant by most critics at the press screening), but I'm not far off. It's been only a couple of years since I graduated high school, and apparently a lot has changed. Truth to be told, it seems to have changed for the worse. Now rather than intellectual conversations between fellow students (which occurred every so often), it seems that the main rhetoric between classmates are the "cough" insults and quite a lot of "you put the 'duh' in 'dumb.'" Now, don't get me wrong, high schoolers are like this every so often, but this is all these high-schoolers do. They insult each other and generally have nothing nice to say.
Add to the insults the cheerleading factor and you'd think you'd have a good movie - wait a second - no you wouldn't. The original title of this movie was "Cheer Fever," thus bringing out the emphasis on cheerleading - which was actually a good change in direction from the rest of the summer's teenager-geared movies in which some sort of relationship was the main plot structure (e.g. Boys and Girls). This was probably the only good point of the film (apart from the always beautiful Kirsten Dunst - who I am surprised took a film of this low caliber). The cheerleading rivalry turns out to be pretty weak and nothing more than the usual good vs. bad, rich vs. poor, black vs. white (although they try not to play the race card too much) showdown.
I didn't really have any high hopes for this film before seeing it so I really wasn't that disappointed, but after walking out of the theater I couldn't believe that I wasted 80 minutes of my day to sit through this piece of film trash that has absolutely no redeeming or entertainment value.
