BRING IT ON (2000) *1/2

Reviewed 9/3/00

Despite being encumbered by a bratty brother and parents nagging her to study, Torrance Shipman (Kirsten Dunst) is happy because she has won captainship of the cheerleading squad at Rancho Carne High in San Diego. The squad has won five consecutive national championships, and Torrance must now shoulder the burden to claim a sixth. The burden however becomes that much greater when the team's newest member, Missy Patone (Eliza Dushku), shows her that this mostly affluent, white squad's winning moves were stolen from that of predominantly black, inner-city East Compton High in Los Angeles. East Compton's lead cheerleader, Isis (Gabrielle Union), taking her squad to the nationals for the first time is ready for revenge. Such is the setup for the comedy "Bring It On," which never quite manages to bring anything on.

Granted, cheerleading is about as easy a target to satire as dog shows (Oh wait, Christopher Guest will be doing just that in his soon-to-open Best in Show), but one would hope for more than the usual squad infighting, spoofing of bad dance moves, and over-determined romance. It's the kind of movie in which you know who the heroine will wind up with at film's end the moment he appears. That's not bad in and of itself, but the burden of the story becomes making how they get together interesting. That doesn't happen here. Bring It On lingers on the potential to go beyond these long-standing teenage-comedy cliches, but simply fails to reach it.

The film's biggest problem is in dealing with its issues of race, specifically, the appropriation of aesthetic black cultural innovations by whites who manage much greater success from them, e.g., Elvis, the Beatles, and most recently, Eminem. There will be those who are quick to say that fluff such as "Bring It On" is undeserving of such analysis, but if "Bring It On" is making a political point, then it is valid to criticize it. Torrance is wracked with stereotypical white guilt and tries to make things right when the East Compton squad finds itself unable to go to nationals for lack of financing. She gets her father's company to write a check to sponsor them for nationals, but Isis rejects it. The point being if blacks are to reach success and for it to count, they need to do it themselves. Yet screenwriter Jessica Bendinger hasn't thought things through, as she evokes affirmative action on the authorial level by making the teams compete on uneven ground anyway, thus making the winner more palatable for the audience and the victory more hollow. This winds up forfeiting her original message. One has to only think about it for only a moment to realize who the winning squad must be without the movie coming off as racist.

It is always difficult to spoof an activity and then be forced to take it seriously for the final contest, and here the finals feel half-hearted. Mostly in long shot, the music supplies the energy, not the movement. Director Peyton Reed's background in television shows. He needlessly shoots numerous close-ups that make you want to scoot back from the screen. There is one reason to go see Bring It On, and that is Eliza Dushku (Faith from the Buffy the Vampire series). She is a revelation and the scene of her cheerleading for the first time, enduring its silliness and then willing herself into it anyway says more than anything else in the movie.