film | High school debacle

JOHN TUCKER MUST DIE is a great title for a teen comedy that's certainly not great, and nor is it good, average, barely tolerable, or in possession of even a single moment of genuine mirth, amusement or likeability. You leave the movie wishing less ill will on the eponymous John Tucker than the screenwriter — Jeff Lowell, for the record — who alleges that John needs to be terminated.

And see, there's the movie's central problem: It can't decide if John (Jesse Metcalf, the hunky gardener on Desperate Housewives) is a philandering jerk or an affable jock whose only crime is simply lovin' too many ladies. When three female classmates from different social strata — the A/V brain (Arielle Kebbel), the head cheerleader (Ashanti), the vegan whore (Sophia Bush) — figure out they're being three-timed by John, they plot to bring him down with the help of the new girl at school (Brittany Snow), a loner wallflower who reads Dave Eggars and digs "old school" Elvis Costello, so, like, you know she's totally got a beautiful soul. They give her a CW-style makeover to lure him in, and then, once her innate depth and smokin' hot bod guide him to the realization that monogamy is way more emotionally fulfilling than serial skeezing, she'll dump him like leftover chinese food, and vengeance will be theirs. Gee, do you think she end up falling for him after he drops the BMOC facade? Oh, the banality!

For the revenge stuff to satisfy, John needs to be portrayed as a proper asshat, but Metcalfe's soft-serve romance with Snow takes the character — and the film — in a confusingly mushy direction. And though Kebbel, Ashanti and Bush are portrayed as mere spank-fantasy cartoon shrews, John Tucker Must Die gets even more female-disempowered by ultimately turing into a smarmy castigation of their behavior — you know, as if they were way out of line to demand their mutual boyfriend treat them with honesty and respect. Alas, their methods are lame, of course, and involve spiking his protien powder with estrogen so that he'll burst into hissy fit during the big basketball game; for a sharper, more creative take on teen backstabbery, please add Mean Girls to your Netflix queue.

In the end, the ladies' catty animus ain't nothing a big old food fight can't solve, and John Tucker learns that it's perfectly fine to treat women like penis repositories as long as he's open about it. (Natch, the women don't seem to mind much cuz, hello, did you see his abs?!) If these people were ever guests on an episode of Jerry Springer, one of them would probably fall back on that hate-the-game-not-the-player business at some point. Me, I hate 'em both equally. F