12th Night meets Bend it like Beckham

Rating: 7/10 (7 April 2006)

Sorry if someone has used that tag line before but i'm not searching through 9 pages of reviews. the price of living in Europe we have to wait for some American releases.
I know I am way outside the target audience of this one but I like the writers.
After a brief flirtation with the bar and the novel by Amanda Brown in Legally Blonde writers Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith have returned to their true love the bard  William Shakespeare. After adapting the Taming of the Shrew into "10 Things I hate about you" they have blended "12th Night" with "Bend it like Beckham". Though to be fair Ewan Leslie actually has first billing of the writers. I won't mention their other film Ella Enchanted as I never saw it and Karen and Kirsten were two of five writers associated with that film.
Anyway the film, Viola has a passion for playing soccer but girl's soccer is cancelled at her school so she decides to attend another school pretending to be someone else to play on their team instead.
To achieve this deception she must walk like a man, talk like a man and spit like a man. The walking isn't too much of a problem, the talking at times she sounds like Steve Martin in "Bringing down the House" with her overuse of African American street slang and the spitting she only does that once.
The most important bit of casting was Amanda Bynes as Viola a pretty girl but with a wig and sideburns could pass for a tall prepubescent boy, strange how different a haircut can make somebody. It's certainly an improvement over her previous film "What a Girl Wants" though I never saw "Lovewrecked" she carries the film though appearing in virtually every scene in some form or another, she has to.
The rest of the cast was of mostly of unknowns to me (Channing Tatum, Laura Ramsey, Robert Hoffman) with the exception of the underused Julia Haggerty (the flight attendant in "Airplane 1 + 2") and the over rated Vinnie Jones. Though to be fair nobody plays a hard man footballer like Vinnie and he is not too stretched in this role, it would have been nice to have had a quirky football coach. As the principle played by David Cross is beyond quirky he is just annoying.
On the whole I enjoyed the film at times I cringed at some of the scenes but its pace sped us to scenes that were actually very amusing, if you enjoyed "10 Things" and "Legally Blonde" you will enjoy this though I know it maybe a little sweet for some tastes.