Review: 'She's The Man' Strains For Laughs

'She's The Man' (PG-13)(out of four)

Over the last several years, it's generally been true that stories featuring men playing women have been comedies, while stories featuring women playing men have been dramas -- all of which makes "She's the Man" at least an interesting failure.

Here, pop sensation Amanda Bynes (from television's "What I Like About You") plays Viola, a tomboy who loves the intense competition of soccer and despises the dresses and primping that accompanies her mother's demand she be a debutante. And when the school cuts her soccer team and denies her a chance to try out for the boy's team -- I'm no expert on Title IX, but I think this might raise a few flags -- she sees an opportunity to bypass the silliness of her elders.

Her brother, Sebastian (James Kirk), has ditched school for a few weeks so he can travel across the ocean to play music with his band (kids, don't try this at home). Meanwhile her divorced parents seem out to lunch, so Viola tells her mom she's with her dad, tells her did she's with her mom, and enrolls in the private school as her brother.

Now granted, the plan, like most adolescent impulses, is not quite thought out. Apparently she'll start school on the first day, stay for a couple weeks, join the soccer team to prove she can do it, and then bail when her brother gets back.

Something here feels disastrously miscalculated. This is not really a funny premise at all, at least not nearly as funny as the thought of the film's four (yes, four) screenwriters hunched over this mediocre script, trying to milk it for every laugh possible.

Well, I guess technically there are five writers. Both the film's press notes and web site -- which curiously features Bynes mocking any visitor that doesn't have an updated flash plug-in -- hypes the film as a revisiting of Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night." The key difference, though, between any single sentence the Bard ever wrote and every single scene in this film is that Shakespeare was interested in emotions, imagination and the human condition that can be explored in even the simplest of stories.

But films like this -- the pulp that Hollywood pumps out for mindless consumption -- avoids these second and third layers like the plague. Anything the least bit challenging or, by its nature, rewarding, is stripped from the experience to give it a wider appeal.

There is one sequence -- yes, only one -- that works in this film. And it's when the movie finally slows down to catch its breath, hinting that behind these ridiculous punch lines and pratfalls is a real character with real thoughts, emotions and insecurities.

It is here that Viola, sporting shorter hair and alternating between girly slips of the tongue and her wide-eyed, grunting impersonation of a boy, is inadvertently put in the position of learning what it's like to be a guy. And the more she talks to her roomie, Duke (Channing Tatum), the story's most complex character caught somewhere between being the man he is and the one he's supposed to be, the more she falls in love because he finally treats her as an equal, not a sex object.

It's the one, real moment in this sea of idiotic star worship, celebrating Bynes for playing dress-up. But seconds later it's back to ignoring this story's issues of class, divorce, self-esteem or love, back to mocking the nerdy girl in a film supposedly about female empowerment, back to giggling at our hero who can only succeed by pretending to be someone she's not.

It's stupid, dull and toothless, and a classic example of why the next generation is increasingly staying away from the movie theaters. Is this all Hollywood thinks of them?