I Love You, Beth Cooper
Maxabout Review
Lacks Heart and Soul.. .
Friday, July 10, 2009
Under the
staggeringly mediocre direction of
Chris Columbus ("Home Alone," the first two "Harry Potter" movies), it
never springs to life. All the pieces are in place: the nerdy guy, the popular girl, the quirky friends, the all-night adventures and the obligatory house-trashing bash. But the pacing feels stagnant and the antics simply aren't inventive enough.
A miscast and misjudged graduation-night comedy, Cooper occasionally -- only occasionally -- wanders into "harmless." Much of the time it's sending bad messages about, oh, driving without your lights on after dark, using sex to score beer and letting peer pressure determine your sexuality.
Somewhere inside "I Love You, Beth Cooper," there lies a high-school comedy in the same vein as the great John Hughes movies of the 1980s.
Columbus has made a boring, by-the-numbers film, filled with dozens of idiotic sequences that seem to be pulled from countless other teenage flicks. None of it is funny, none of it is endearing and most of it is unenjoyable and quite tedious to watch. The running gag of muscle-bound Kevin trying to kill scrawny Denis is both moronic and over-the-top. It wears thin after about five minutes, yet it keeps cropping up continually and annoyingly throughout the entire film.
Panettiere is insanely cute as always and the camera does adore her, but she hasn't developed the dramatic chops yet to make Beth's human frailty believable. And so Beth Cooper remains an elusive idea, even to us, rather than the kind of anchor this movie could have used when it shifts from adolescent wackiness to sweet poignance.
As Denis, Paul Rust is unappealing and brings nothing to the table. He doesn't possess an ounce of natural charisma. His comic shtik feels like second-rate Jerry Lewis, or worse: A sampling of the worst from Adam Sandler. Rust's Denis is a caricature of the classic loser and carries no real emotional weight whatsoever. The same goes for Denis's supposedly gay sidekick (Jack T. Carpenter), who's written as the comic relief, but fails to crack a single funny outside of the sexual orientation gag.
It almost feels as if each actor is acting alone. The lines do not click. The chemistry is entirely absent and the bonds pulling each person towards each other are undefined and entirely unbelievable.
In the annals of coming-of-age movies, I Love You, Beth Cooper is definitely one of the more inert entries. The movie displays a remarkable amount of restraint for a project revolving around hormone-laden love and graduation night experimentation.
I Love You, Beth Cooper misses on all these scores because it's a tad too polite, and far too predictable - which betrays the very essence of adolescence, and the hairy ride towards adulthood.