Fearless Writer ... Reviews

Stars: Amanda Bynes, Channing Tatum, Julie Hagerty

Director: Andy Fickman

Modernising Shakespeare’s works has been a favourite pastime of film-makers ever since Baz Luhrman was did it so brilliantly with Romeo + Juliet (1996). Some interpretations have worked well enough (10 Things I Hate About You, which was inspired by The Taming of the Shrew) and some have been cinematic disembowellings fit to make The Bard turn in his grave – if you have never seen Michael Almereyda’s pretentious fiddling with Hamlet (2000), do yourself a favour and don’t.

In the case of She’s The Man, it’s Twelfth Night being reengineered to suit the palates of attention-deficient teenagers. Viola (Amanda Bynes) and her friends are mad-keen on soccer, but their team is cut from the schedule due to a shortage of players. They confront their coach and demand to be added to the boys’ team, but are laughed off as being too weak to bridge the gender gap. Viola decides this is unacceptable, and in an elaborate false identity scheme, poses as her brother so she can enter the male tryouts.

Initially she is only picked as a ‘second string’ player, so she makes a deal with her superstar roommate Duke (Channing Tatum) – if he trains her up to first-string quality, she will help him get a date with the girl of his dreams, Olivia. But in classic Shakespeare style, a chain reaction of misunderstanding throws everything into chaos as Viola falls in love with her roommate and the object of his affections falls in love with Viola.

In its opening montage, She’s The Man gives the impression it is going to be a juvenile insult to one of Shakespeare’s great dramatic comedies, and in this it doesn’t entirely disappoint. Yet for all its groan-worthy moments and lame tweeny jokes about feminine hygiene products, She’s The Man has an amiable goofiness that manages to snatch it from the maw of disaster and turn it into a largely watchable teen comedy. Kudos must go to Bynes, who somehow uses bubbliness to carry off each ridiculous scene – she’s far from convincing as a boy, but her earnest, unassuming face helps the viewer mindlessly accept the abject nonsense filling the screen. In fact, it’s the actors generally who elevate She’s The Man off the dungheap where it rightly belongs, with David Cross’s over-tolerant principal stealing laughs from situations that were twee 20 years ago and Julie Hagerty hamming it up wonderfully as the prim and proper Daphne.

Of course, it would take a special kind of director to cripple the latent genius of a Shakespeare play – and in the end, it’s the Bard himself, not Andy Fickman or the cast, who should receive praise for this movie’s limited merits.

VERDICT: 3/5 stars