"It is amazing how potent cheap music can be," Noel Coward, Private Lives.

Rating: Null/10 (17 October 2004)

A leather-jacketed "teenage" half-wit (Travolta) has the hots for his polar opposite: The shy straight-laced school exchange student (Newton-John). Can they - somehow - meet in the middle?
How great it is to see a film push so many bad messages: From smoking to disrespecting all authority (who grin and bare it - which makes it OK?) through dangerous driving on public property.
Here the plot stops to make room for a song and dance number irrespective of whether be something to do with what has just gone on or help us understand events better. Given that the songs are passable and the plot terrible we don't mind.
(In fact we welcome it with open arms like a tight pair of shoes being taken off!)
The music is fun and everybody is throwing themselves around having the time of their lives - but this just a set of pop video's linked by a plot that seems to want to get in every 50's teen movie cliché it can think of.
Many films are actually about nothing. Some of them are praised more than this and are hell on earth to sit through. Here we have lots of fun scenes that you find yourself enjoying while pretending not to.
So to summate: It is junk - it made millions - it is camp - it cemented Travolta a star - it is cliché - it gave Newton-John her fifteen minutes - it is silly - it made film soundtrack history. Pick the bones out of that.