It is entirely possible to make a compelling and interesting film which is populated with characters who are unlikeable or even reprehensible. It just assumes that we already find cheerleaders annoying, turns the characters briefly up to 11 and leaves it at that. But Bring It On doesn't make as much effort as it could to challenge any of the personality traits associated with the sport.
BRING IT ON SCRIPT MOVIE PDF TV
We're all familiar with the many film and TV cliches surrounding cheerleaders, whether they are spiteful and spoilt (Libby from Sabrina the Teenage Witch) or so oversexualised that it borders on creepy (subverted in Jennifer's Body). Everyone else, on the other hand, is much of a catty muchness.Īs a result, Bring It On can often come across as grating and stereotypical. We can identify Missy because she sees through the group's vacuity, and we remember Kirsten Dunst's character because of her subsequent success. Here, however, it quickly becomes difficult to distinguish between the main protagonists. The film is written by Jessica Bendinger, who would later demonstrate on Stick It that she could write a range of interesting, very different female characters (and direct them very nicely too).
If there is one word to describe the entire tone of Bring It On, it is bitchy. The tone of the dialogue doesn't change much, but the shift is not wholly convincing and ends up softening a lot of the satirical blow. Having got across a clear message about the stupidity of cheerleading, through characters which take it so seriously that it hurts, it then mutates into a feel-good underdog comedy in which we are meant to root for Kirsten Dunst and her term of perfectionist brats. This would be fine, up to a point, but as the film moves on its plot movements become more predictable and it attempts to turn its whole premise on its head. The result is that we are completely on board with its criticisms of the sport, but feel like an audience at a circus laughing at clowns rather than feeling for the people under the make-up. In essence, it does a great job of showing us how shallow and pointless cheerleading is by making us actively hate pretty much all the characters. In both respects, Bring It On is a partial success, albeit in a deeply frustrating way. And secondly, it must achieve this while giving us characters which feel like real people, either by having them expose cheerleading from the outside, or by doing a Spinal Tap and making us laugh as their delusional levels of self-belief. Firstly, it must get to grips with its subject matter, exposing the absurdities and hypocrisies of cheerleading in a humourous and relatable way. Hence any sports film which centres around women, or addresses the standards to which they must confirm, has to overcome both the standard baggage that comes with writing female characters and the extra baggage of the genre's reputation and target market.īecause Bring It On is positioning itself as a satire, it must do two things to succeed.
One could write whole theses on the notion that cinema as a medium could be considered inherently masculine, but in any case the sports genre is dominated by stories of men rather than of women. When I reviewed Stick It, I spoke at great lengths about the difficulties of writing believable female characters, particulary when it comes to sports films. Whichever side you gravitate towards, it is definitely worthy of its cult status. Peyton Reed's debut effort is both a bitingly cheerful snipe at cheerleading and a confused missed opportunity. But his maxim does provide us with a useful means of assessment, since Bring It On leaves us completely in two minds. The chances are that he would have hated it, given his bad experience of working in Hollywood in the 1930s, turning out scripts for Joseph L. It's difficult to know exactly what Fitzgerald would have made of Bring It On. Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby, once said: "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." His point was that coming down on one side or another in a given argument is relatively easy, while it takes an active and detailed engagement with the topic in hand to understand the implications of each opinion.
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