You know a geeky high school movie isn’t working when you want the bully to smack the nerdy hero - hard.
“I Love You, Beth Cooper” composts half a dozen high school comedies into one sloppy,stinky mess.
And as a starring vehicle for “Heroes” hottie Hayden Panettiere “Beth Cooper” proves a villainous choice.
“Beth Cooper” begins with great promise. A high school valedictorian named Denis (Paul Rust) decides against giving a boilerplate graduation speech.
Instead, he tells everyone about his long-smoldering passion for Beth Cooper (Panettiere), a beautiful high school cheerleader.
Beth doesn’t rush the stage with mutual admiration. But the two end up getting to know each other over the course of a crazy night, one which includes Denis getting routinely pummeled by Beth’s beau and other age-appropriate hijinks.
Your heart goes out to Denis in tate opening scene, but you’ll find plenty of reasons to abandon the geeky protagonist.
Panettiere shows she doesn’t belong in a starring role quite yet, but that could be the result of the woefully inert material. The jokes, the ones that can be identified as such, either have no payoff or simply elicit groans.
Movie nerds are an old film tradition, but Denis and his potentially gay partner in crime (Jack Carpenter) are so gawky you’ll want to throw them in their school lockers and slam the doors shut.
The plot meanders along, buoyed by flat comic violence that comes at us without motivation. Why is Beth Cooper and her superficial gal pals bothering to hang out with these dweebs? What bonds them? And what’s got her boyfriend so darn angry?
What’s stunning is that journeyman director Chris Columbus is behind such a lackluster effort. The man who started the “Harry Potter’ franchise and put Robin Williams in drag is hardly an auteur, but his comic staging here borders on amateur hour.
“I Love You, Beth Cooper” carries a flicker of promise early on but soon reminds us why it disappeared in movie theaters late last summer.
(Photo: in “I Love You, Beth Cooper.”/Courtesy of Fox Home Entertainment)
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I'm an award-winning journalist and film critic with more than a decade of experience in newspapers, magazines and the Web. I'm a member of both the Washington, DC Area Film Critics Association and the Denver Film Critics Society.
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