Unfunny, bland comedy, it S-U-C-K-SUCKS!

Rating: Null/10 (4 January 2002)

The five times cheerleading champions find themselves in competition with another high school who have honed their routines to challenge for the title. Torr adds to her team and competes with Isis's Clover Team for the state championship.
This is a comedy. I want to make that clear because I watched this and I didn't know it was a comedy until I read it on the side of the box. The plot is almost unimportant it is so thin - basically it's a cheerleading competition. There is some interest at the start with Dushku's sassy character trying out for the team, but she is quickly assimilated to be a characterless member of the gang and any interest is lost. It's really difficult to get into the characters, mainly because the guts of the film is dance numbers but also because they are all preppy, unpleasant cheerleader types who look down their noses at others - why should I care what happens to them? The whole thing culminates with the state championship but by then I'd pretty much given up.
The comedy is very sparse, there are some funny moments, but nothing that stretches to a scene. The main fault of the film for me was to turn the cheerleading contest into something that felt like a white v's black conflict - one team is predominately white while the other is predominately black. I don't know if this was intentional but to make something as trivial as this and add race to it was a big mistake.
Kristen Dunst proves that she can't lead a film and gives a terrible performance throughout. Union and the other black characters give very clichéd performances and put the progress of black actors back ten years by being stereotypes of snapping fingers, neck movements and "talk to the hand" style dialogue (The R n'B trio Blaque are the worst offenders). It's almost embarrassing to watch them be the same black characters that are in every "black" comedy. As I said Missy (Dushku) is the only interesting character in the thing but even she is lost before the halfway mark.
The conclusion is cheesy and the credits sequence (everyone singing "Hey, Mickey" intercut with outtakes) is not half as charming as they think it is. Overall an unfunny, bland comedy that you will only enjoy if you like the sight of girls in cheerleader outfits.