No "Brittany Taylor's" on this squad.

Rating: Null/10 (20 April 2005)

Most movies and TV shows involving cheerleaders make them out to be idiots, notably TV movies about the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders, the one about the Los Angeles Laker girls starring Tina Yothers, and especially that fine upstanding MTV cartoon of the late-1990's "Daria." But while the ones in "Bring it On" aren't all A students, they're certainly not the bimbos we're used to seeing. The only thing Torrance Shipman has in common with Brittany Taylor(besides C-average grades and a bratty little brother), is that she's a blonde.
This movie elevates cheerleaders as something more than eye-candy with negative I.Q.'s for middle-aged horny men and sex-deprived teenage boys. It presents them as athletes in their own right, and when you consider that every other athletic team on the Rancho Carne High Toros are complete losers, they're lucky the cheerleaders are so good.... or are they? Torrance Shipman(Kirsten Dunst) has just replaced "Big Red"(Lindsay Sloane) as team captain, and realizes she's under a lot of pressure, especially with her boyfriend leaving for college, and a member of the squad injured during practice. When two new kids move in from Los Angeles, Torrance finds out that she's falling for the new boy, and his sister(who proved to be a shoe-in at tryouts) is a gymnastics student who reveals that all their routines were stolen from an inner-city high school. After the rest of Rancho Carne High finds out their routine was stolen, they hire a snobbish pill-chugging choreographer named Sparky Polastri. Notice I said "pill-chugging," not "pill-popping." Unfortunately, this works just as well as Big Red's stolen routine, and now they have to use every other athletic, gymnastic, and and dance form to enhance their routines.
This movie gives a whole new perspective on cheerleading, but even that's not what makes it so good. Aside from the chance to ogle the goodies of a group of young women, it shows them as individual people, who happen to be dedicated to their sport. It also makes a blatant effort to debunk the myth of male cheerleaders being gay, by having a blatantly horny member who's fingers "occasionaly slip" under his fellow squad-member's dresses, and one cheerleader who seems to like it... a lot. Best of all, it has actual humor. Eliza Dushku has some great lines, but she's not the only one with some good ones. And for better or worse, it has raised the bar for REAL cheerleaders who now have to live up to this movie as the standard level of excellence.