Vulgar Yankee Razzamatazz

Rating: 5/10 (25 July 2014)

Cheerleading may be a beloved American institution, but it has never really caught on here in Britain. The reasons for this are partly aesthetic ("Vulgar razzamatazz!"), partly nationalist ("Vulgar Yankee razzamatazz!") and partly feminist. ("Shouldn't women play a more active role in sport than dressing in skimpy costumes and standing on the sidelines to cheer on the men?")
It would, however, appear from "Bring It On" that this last objection is also shared by some Americans, as cheerleading has now become a competitive sport in its own right, a sport which, moreover, is open to mixed-sex teams. (I often wonder if competitive cheerleading teams ever have their own non-competitive cheerleaders to cheer them on). The film is set in the fictitious Rancho Carne High School in San Diego, California. There is a running joke that the school's football team, "the Toros", are a useless bunch of losers who get soundly thrashed in every game they play, but the school's cheerleading squad, who nominally exist to cheer on the hopeless Toros, are brilliant- in fact they are the reigning national cheerleading champions.
The main character in the film is Torrance Shipman, the captain of the cheerleading squad. Despite that male-sounding name, Torrance is a girl. (The squad might be mixed-sex, but the film concentrates far more on the female members than the male ones). In fact, virtually all the female cheerleaders have forenames that sound either sexually ambiguous or even distinctly masculine, generally surnames that have been pressed into service as baptismal names- Torrance, Carver, Whitney, Courtney, Casey, Darcy. There are so many that I wondered if the scriptwriter was indulging in some satire at the eccentric naming habits of American parents. About the only squad member with a recognisably feminine Christian name is Missy (a diminutive of Melissa), but she is an outsider who has recently moved to the school from Los Angeles.
Torrance's reign as captain gets off to a bad start when the aforementioned Carver is injured during a training session. Torrance is keen to recruit the aforementioned Missy, who possesses impressive athletic skills, but Missy, a gymnast at her former school, holds to the "vulgar razzamatazz" opinion of cheerleading, and only joins the squad (with great reluctance) when she learns that Rancho Carne does not have its own gymnastics team. Missy, however, brings bad news with her. The team's cheerleading routines have all been stolen by their previous captain from an inner-city Los Angeles team, the Clovers. (Intellectual property theft is not, it would appear, actually forbidden in the cheerleading world, although it is strongly deprecated).
Other plot lines involve a love-triangle between Torrance, her unreliable boyfriend Aaron and Missy's handsome brother Cliff, and the emergence of the Clovers as Rancho Carne's main rivals at the national finals. I suspect that the original intention was to make the Clovers Irish-American; their clover-leaf emblem recalling the shamrock, their leprechaun-like mascot and their green-and-orange uniforms all suggest Irish associations. In the film, however, they are African-American whereas the Rancho Carne squad are (apart from a token Chinese girl) all Caucasian; doubtless someone thought that a black-versus-white clash would be more dramatic.
Kirsten Dunst is neither an outstanding actress nor a striking beauty, yet she has become a popular figure in Hollywood movies, probably because of her ability to project a girl-next-door sweetness. (She even played Marie Antoinette as a girl-next-door Queen of France). This film is a good example of this ability; despite her juggling of two boys we always think of Torrance as the Nice Girl figure. (And, of course, one of the boys turns out to be unworthy of her innocent niceness). It helps that Kirsten, a former child-star, was only eighteen when the film was made, whereas Gabrielle Union, who plays the Clovers' captain Isis, was a full decade older, in keeping with the normal movie convention that the school leaving age is around 30. Of the other acting contributions the only ones worthy of mention are Eliza Dushku's rather truculent Missy and Ian Roberts as Sparky Polastri, the arrogant, self-obsessed choreographer brought in to coach the cheerleaders.
The film will probably please fans of organised competitive cheerleading (who are, as I said, more likely to be found across the Atlantic than on this side), and it must be said that the routines are often performed with some energy and skill. Overall, however, this is just another clichéd sporting drama about triumph and tragedy and rivalry and friendship on the sports field and love and romance off it. (See the recent British "Fast Girls" for another example of the same thing, albeit about a more mainstream sport). The only original thing about "Bring It On" is that it applies these clichés to a sport which had not previously received much attention from Hollywood. 5/10