film | Kind of a drag

SHE'S THE MAN tweaks William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night for the Abercrombie crowd, and the net result is even more unmemorable than 10 Things I Hate About You's blah twist on The Taming of the Shrew back in 1998. It's quite depressing to report, but the mallrat-lit genre has crumbled considerably since the brilliant Clueless plopped Jane Austen's Emma into the Coolio-era Beverly Hills of 11 years ago. You'll cringe at the thought of what's next — Howards End redone as an emo MTV musical with all-new songs by Dashboard Confessional? Chad Michael Murray, Talan Torriero, Adam Brody and Nick Cannon in Little Men? Hilary Duff as Tess of the d'Urbervilles?

Teenybopper starlet Amanda Bynes (What a Girl Wants) nabs the role of Twelfth Night heroine Viola, updated here as a varsity athlete who's peeved when her school yanks the ladies' soccer team. Presumably because a Norma Rae-ish rally against institutional sexism would be lost on Bynes' target audience, she decides to enroll at a neighboring prep academy under the identity of her twin brother, only her affected faux-butch baritone and frat-boy mannerisms — seriously, she hoots and hollers like she's in the boisterous family-dinner scenes from Eddie Murphy's Nutty Professor movies — are so transparent and irritatingly forced that they're hardly convincing or funny. And her disguise. Oy. In her mop-top wig and glue-on sideburns, Bynes looks ... well, macho's a huge stretch, and even boyish is verging on a pulled muscle. Mmm, let's say creepy. I've seen sock puppets that aspired to higher levels of masculine anatomical correctness.

With the comedic/romantic entanglements stemming from Bynes' dumb drag show rendered completely idiotic, you take your diversions where you can find them: in the occasional clever line ("Is it just me, or does this soccer game have more nudity than most?") and a few supporting performances that are really quite sharp for this type of film. There's Channing Tatum (Coach Carter) as the jock roommate bynes secretly admires, and Laura Ramsey (Venom) as the misled cutie who, for some weird reason, becomes smitten with Bynes' male alter-ego. She's the Man isn't concerned with the psychological ramifications that ordinarily might trouble young people caught in this web of complex infatuations and gender confusion — as the great Shakes himself once wrote, "All's well that ends well." Yeah, and not a moment too soon. C-