JAWBREAKER by DeWyNGaLe Rating: C+
Jawbreaker is the tale of what can happen when innocent birthday pranks can go wrong. At Reagan High, four girls are sitting on top of the world. Courtney, played by Rose McGowan, is the meanest girl in the school. Everyone hates her, but everyone wishes they had her popularity. She is the leader of the four girls. Julie, played by Rebecca Gayheart, Liz Purr, played by Charlotte Roldan, and Marcie, played by Julie Benz are the other three in the group. It is Liz's seventeenth birthday, and Julie, Courtney, and Marcie decide to play a prank on her. They wake her up in scary outfits, shove a jawbreaker in her mouth and put tape over it to make her be quiet, and shove her in the trunk of their car. After awhile, they check up on her and she is dead, the jawbreaker caught in her throat. The girls cannot believe what has happened. Courtney wants to cover it up, and just act like she is sick, but Julie knows the right thing to do. The first ten minutes where these events occur were very interesting, and showed a lot of potential towards a great movie, but it started to fade off.
The girls decide to put Liz back in bed, and make it look like some man killed her. Julie is totally against them. Now, the girls have run into a problem. Fern, the most unpopular girl in the school witnessed the event of them trying to cover it up. Courtney makes a deal. She will turn Fern into one of the popular girls if she will keep her mouth shut. Everything is different now at Reagan High. Julie has dropped out of the popular group, and she really wants to tell the police what happened. Besides, she didn't do much anyway. From here, Rebecca Gayheart is not seen very much in the film, and that is a big disappointment. Her acting skills were the best among the large cast, and she could have added to the film. When Rebecca's character does show up, the film starts to pick up and get more interesting.
Fern's new alias is Vylette, and everyone admires her. She is even more popular than Courtney and she doesn't think this is right. Vylette is extremely annoying and Judy Greer delivers a terrible, annoying, overdone acting performance. If it wasn't for the character of Vylette, the film could have been a lot better. Julie tries to turn Vylette back to the good side, but is unsuccessful, because now Vylette doesn't want to do the right thing and tell the truth to the police. Julie Benz also gave a horrid performance, and was almost as annoying as the character of Vylette. Rose McGowan was good, but not as good as she was as "Tatum", in 1996's Scream. Her role was annoying, but in a good way. She was extremely mean, and she was the type of character that was neat, but you downright hated her.
Throughout the film, it gets way off track and drifts a lot. We get way off of the topic of the jawbreaker incident, and get into things that don't have anything to do with the actual film. The beginning and ending are great, it's just the middle that needed a lot of help. During the body of the movie, it seemed to be the same thing for about an hour. Nothing interesting happened, and the same, extremely annoying song plays over and over again. Don't get me wrong, Jawbreaker wasn't a bad film, but it certainly wasn't very good. It isn't very funny either. It tries to use the type of humor used in Clueless, but it doesn't succeed at all. There are only a few amusing sequences, but they die off quickly. A nice performance that was in the film was Officer Vera Cruz, played by the popular Pam Grier. She was the detective trying to crack the case of the jawbreaker.
The Bottom Line- Benz and Greer should have taken a lesson from the pros- McGowan and Gayheart.
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