Director: Andy Finkman
Stars: Amanda Bynes, Channing Tatum, David Cross
Amanda Bynes pretends to be a guy so she can play soccer. Also, Channing Tatum sticks a tampon up his nose.
Amanda Bynes and Channing Tatum doing Shakespeare… this could've been a lot worse.
A teen adaptation of the Bard's comedy "Twelfth Night," SHE'S THE MAN aspires to be JUST ONE OF THE GUYS for the millennial generation. And while it's fairly awful and cornier than a bowl of flakes, the movie tries hard enough that a few jokes and offbeat lines actually work. (Many thanks to David Cross's headmaster.) God knows Amanda Bynes also gives it her all, with her constant mugging and wacky acting, but anybody not chock full of tween estrogen will find her performance painful and annoying. Thankfully, Channing Tatum is there to pick up the pieces
The results of Channing's first attempt at Gambit's accent weren't pretty.
You do see hints of his future 21 JUMP STREET comedic chops, but It's almost as if this film exists solely to ridicule Channing Tatum. The future exotic dancer/action star plays Duke (no relation to his GI JOE character, I hope), a soccer player obsessively in love with school hottie Olivia. But despite looking like a young Channing Tatum, Duke is too scared to talk to girls and Amanda Bynes, dressed in drag, has to train him on how to be a man. (His response to this instruction is to proactively ask every girl he meets about cheese.) Nothing will kill your MAGIC MIKE lady boner faster than seeing Tatum screaming at the sight of a spider or using a tampon to stop a nosebleed or coming to terms with his own sensitivity. When he finally finds out his male roommate actually has internal genitalia, his reaction is not anger: "If I had known you were a girl, we wouldn't have talked like we did, and got to know each other the same way. And that would've been a shame."
…said the star of MAGIC MIKE XXL.
The rest of SHE'S THE MAN fares as well as expected. Bynes stars as a high school soccer player named Viola who has to take drastic action when her coach shuts down the team and says that girls aren't as good as boys. Typically one would have a chat with a school administrator or write an angry letter to the school board, but Bynes decides to take it one step further by enrolling at their rival school as her brother, living as a boy for the semester and defeating her old alma mater in a soccer game. I know this is supposed to promote a positive feminist message to the young audience, but the script is ironically filled with so many terrible gender stereotypes and "bro" homophobia that it undermines whatever good intentions they had. And if the entire point is supposed to be proving that girls can do anything boys can, why do they make Viola so bad at soccer that she doesn't make the new team and has to be trained by penis-owner Channing Tatum?
You're doing it wrong.
It doesn't help that the basic plot of the movie is both creepy and poorly thought out to an embarrassing degree. Not just the fact that Viola looks nothing like a boy in any way (and somehow manages to spend every day in a locker room without arousing suspicion), but for some reason the writers and/or Amanda Bynes decided that acting as the opposite sex should include talking in ebonics regularly. I would suggest taking a shot every time Bynes says something like "Sup G-Money!" or "Holla at ya boy!" but I think your liver would give out before the halfway point.
"Thank God this is a school for the blind. Otherwise your plan might not have worked!"
One last thing that I found amusing—the disturbing amount of inappropriate implied nudity in this movie. At one point, Bynes has to change in and out of her male disguise in to a bra-less dress. First she does this in a moonbounce full of children. Then she goes on a carnival ride and gets naked while sharing a car with another child. Later, at the climactic grade-school soccer game, Bynes again lifts up her shirt to flash the crowd and prove she's a girl. Her brother also pulls down his pants on the field and exposes his "willis and doodleberries" to do the same. If this were real life, I feel like half the characters would be added to some sex offender list.
The unrated cut of BIG FAT LIAR got weird pretty fast.
Channing Tatum asks girls about cheese and other memorable lines.
Inappropriate nudity and Channing Tatum embarrassing himself in front of girls and spiders.
Grow a pair! Buy this movie here!
Take a shot or drink every time:
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BONUS – Check out our new video column Awfully Good Movies below! This week we take a look at the terrible 1994 videogame adaptation of DOUBLE DRAGON, starring Mark Dacascos, Scott Wolf, Robert Patrick, and Alyssa Milano!
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