‘All That’ without the bag of chips

Kyle Moss

Don’t let the teary-eyed girls fool you when they say, “‘She’s All That’ was such a cute movie.”

The truth of the matter is, it is a typical high school flick with clich‚d lines and cheezy characters.

The movie stars Freddie Prinze Jr. (“I Know What You Did Last Summer”) as Zach, the big-shot high school class president who drives around his brand new Land Rover with licensed plates that say something like “Mr. Prez.”

As he walks around his Los Angeles school looking at pictures of himself on the wall, the girls flap their eye-lashes in amazement, squealing things such as, “He looked at me; I can’t believe he looked at me.”

The dumb thing about Prinze Jr.’s character is that at the beginning, he seems really cocky and self-absorbed, but as the movie develops, he is actually a really nice guy who is pretty humble.

Zach arrives back to school from spring break to find that while his girlfriend was hanging at the MTV beach house, she fell for “Real World” star Brock (Mathew Lillard).

After the break-up, Zach and his friend Derek (Chris Owen) get into a discussion about Zach’s apparent ability to turn anyone into the next prom queen.

Derek challenges Zach with a bet to turn the school’s biggest dork into the school’s most popular chick.

Zach chooses Laney, an art-obsessed shy girl who looks and talks like a mouse (Rachael Leigh Cook).

So Zach sets in with his mission and begins his attempted wooing (where did that word come from?) of Laney.

Then come the long line of clich‚ events.

At first Laney disses Zach, then she starts to like him, then he really starts to like her and doesn’t want the bet to be known.

When Derek thinks he is losing the bet, he moves in on Laney and tells her about the bet so Laney will be mad at Zach.

Zach tries but can’t quite get it out that he really likes Laney and that the bet was a mistake. Poor guy.

In the midst of these events, Laney has become the most popular girl in school and is in a heated race for prom queen with Zach’s ex.

Everything that happens up to this point is somewhat believable.

Then comes the prom.

During the prom, everyone in the school does a choreographed dance to Fatboy Slim’s “Funk Soul Brotha Song.” The song was cool — the dance was not.

You can probably figure out the ending for yourselves.

Prinze and Cook give average performances, but Owen was almost distracting with his horrible acting. He is a perfect example of someone who gets all of his roles because of his looks (women drool over this guy).

The characters who made this movie endurable were Brock and Laney’s father (Kevin Pollak). Both characters added much-needed humor to the film.

With lines like “talk to the hand” and even the title, “She’s All That,” the movie’s outdatedness even went as far as to make the paint-covered be-yourself girl the nerd (she would probably be a cool person in a high school today).

The overdone scenarios and clich‚d script make this flick an extended “Saved By the Bell” episode at best.

1 star out of five


Kyle Moss is a freshman in journalism and mass communication from Urbandale.