Late January last year was dead season at the multiplex, the kind of time when Eye of the Beholder could lead the box office with an $8 million opening weekend. This year seems a different story – I can’t head out to the theater on a Saturday night and not encounter flashing sold-out signs under some of the most random-seeming choices. The Family Man, The Pledge, O Brother Where Art Thou. But a friend and I were just in time Saturday night a week ago (I know, I’m nothing if not prompt with these reviews) to snatch up two of the few remaining tickets for Sugar and Spice, the latest dumbed-down teen comedy and one I had sworn I could never, ever be forced to watch.

The average age in the theater was somewhere between 11.5 and 13.5, adjusted for inflation via parents on mini-van duty who were scattered throughout the crowd and all seemed to wish they were elsewhere. My friend and I, both 22, also stuck out like sore, arrested-development case thumbs. So, yeah, I was as skeptical as ever, considering I haven’t come across a teen movie I’ve actually liked since Can’t Hardly Wait.

But I wasn’t counting on a seriously devious script from Mandy Nelson, who tosses out acerbic one-liners and infuses the movie with an inherent self-loathing for the cheerleaders it supposedly idolizes. This is one teen movie that doesn’t take itself the least bit seriously, but instead of being merely vapid and inconsequential, it serves as sharp-witted satire.

Your only clues this movie wasn’t written by a bitter, Daria-esque teenager from deep in the trenches come in the form of ’80s pop culture references, most of which flew straight over the heads of the target audience. The main characters – that whitebread head cheerleader/football quarterback couple inherent to every American high school – are named Jack and Diane, and at one point, when hit by crisis pregnancy, a straight-faced character presents the lyrics from Madonna’s “Papa Don’t Preach” as rebuttal.

Not to mention, Sugar and Spice is set at one Lincoln High, and the school’s mascot is a kid in an Uncle Sam-like costume topped off with an enormous, comically distorted Abraham Lincoln head. In an early scene that seemed to only crack up my friend and me, the elderly school principal is imparting irrelevant wisdom to the student body during an assembly (“If a drunken uncle touches you in your swimsuit area, what should you do?”) while the mascot tries to interpret the words into physical action behind him. The scene is worth the price of admission… student price, anyway. (I wouldn’t spot it the full $7.50 on that sequence alone, but you know what I’m saying.)

Diane (Marley Shelton), the head cheerleader, is the obnoxious (but – oh my God – so very nubile and gorgeous) leader of her social circle. She gives herself a motivational speech in the mirror every morning and races off to meet her comic stereotype friends. There’s the rebel (luscious Mena Suvari, who has a gift for comedy), the Jesus freak/virgin, the “stalker” whose one character quirk is that she’s obsessed with Conan O’Brien and the “walking left-brain.” Together, they perform a few TRL T&A routines and make the cool bathroom their hangout, while Diane gives most of her free time to her boyfriend (James Marsden, some nobody with a Tom Cruise smile and Tom Cruise mannerisms).

The film is narrated by Marla Sokoloff, who played the platonic friend in Whatever It Takes and redeems herself for it here. She’s an angry, devious b_tch who’s been relegated to junior-varsity cheer status for her entire high school career. She cracks obnoxious one-liners, slurs homosexuals and sets up the movie’s story for us (and the police who are interrogating her). The girls, as you know, end up robbing a bank and making Romy and Michele look downright Mensa-brilliant in the process, but Sugar and Spice wisely takes its time getting to that part. The bank-robbery plot elements are by-the-numbers sitcom fluff (save Suvari’s hilarious killer line about The Apple Dumpling Gang), but the movie’s first two acts are mostly of the savage satire variety.

Trouble strikes when the nobody-Cruise gets Diane pregnant, and the pair, disowned by both sets of parents, must move into an apartment together and work menial jobs to pay the bills. Diane’s job, as the plot dictates, is at a bank branch inside a supermarket, but Jack ends up working at a local video store, where two of the school’s biggest losers are overjoyed that they now get to hang out with him and absorb his suave, masculine wisdom. These are good scenes.

That’s not to say Sugar and Spice doesn’t have its glaring flaws and half-assed short cuts. There are plenty of those, particularly as the movie wears on, but the comedy is strong enough that the movie stands on its own in the end. So, inevitably, I’m left with a bit of a quandary here – I went to this movie expecting to trash it and go off on it, and I ended up liking it. Now, every time the movie comes up in conversation and my friends and acquaintances deride its very existence, I feel obligated to defend it, to tell them Sugar and Spice is better than you’d think and downright hilarious at points. And none of them seem to believe me. I don’t blame them, of course, but I know they’d be just as surprised as I was if they gave this dumbass teen movie a chance.


Recommended:
Yes

Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older