_Drive_Me_Crazy_ (PG-13) * (out of ****)
As the press notes are so eager to announce, _Drive_Me_Crazy_ takes its title from "(You Drive Me) Crazy," the latest hit single by teen pop phenomenon Britney Spears. Since Fox went so far out of its way to retitle the film for the tune (the original name was the more fitting but Britney-inspiration-lacking _Next_to_You_), I will go through each of this teen comedy's painfully pedestrian plot paces as it relates to the song.
"Baby, I'm so into you/You got that something/What can I do?" In-crowd high school girl Nicole (Melissa Joan Hart) pines for star basketball stud Brad (Gabriel Carpenter). Similarly, her next-door neighbor (hence the film's original title), outcast bad boy Chase (Adrian Grenier) is so into his girlfriend Dulcie (Ali Larter).
"Baby, you spin me around/The earth is moving/But I can't feel the ground." Brad withdraws his invitation to Nicole to a big dance after he falls for a cheerleader. As coincidence would have it, around the same time, Dulcie gives Chase the heave-ho. Determined to win back their respective paramours, Nicole and Chase--now made over into a clean-cut popular guy--pretend to be a couple in order to incite jealousy in their exes.
"Every time you look at me/My heart is jumpin'/It's easy to see/You drive me crazy/I just can't sleep/I'm so excited/I'm in too deep/Oh oh oh, crazy/But it feels all right/Baby, thinking of you keeps me up all night." Of course, Nicole and Chase find that their false attraction has become real; as the song goes, in one scene, Chase, lost in thought about Nicole, stays up an entire night. With this easily foreseen turn of events comes the major flaw of the screenplay by Rob Thomas. The way these mismatched couple movies are supposed to work is that once the "ugly duckling" is made over, the other person falls for him/her--by seeing through the slick veneer and taking a liking to his/her "true self." In this film, Nicole takes a liking to Chase once he starts acting like the in-crowd and gradually erases all trace of his original personality. So much for not judging a book by its cover.
The film is not helped by Hart's accordingly shallow performance, which never once convinces that there's anything more to Nicole than her popular girl image. Even more ruinous is the complete lack of chemistry between her and Grenier, and Thomas and director John Schultz come up with nothing else to hold the audience's attention; certainly not the routine subplots, including nice guy Dave (Mark Webber)'s cyber romance and the scheming of Nicole's so-called best-friend Alicia (Susan May Pratt). _Drive_Me_Crazy_ feels like another lackluster youth entry into the new fall TV season, a point driven home by one touch that is amusing for all the wrong reasons: there are a number of basketball scenes in the film, and it's hard not to notice that on Brad's team and all the others they play, every single player is Caucasian.
I was expecting _Drive_Me_Crazy_ to follow the same tactic that _Dangerous_Minds_ used with its featured hit single, "Gangsta's Paradise"--that is, milk it to death and then some, exploiting the theatre's Dolby Digital sound system whenever possible to remind patrons exactly what brought them into the theatre. But it didn't; in fact, it got to the point where I was actually _waiting_ for the song to blare on the soundtrack. (For the record, it is played for a brief moment mid-film and then in its entirety during the end credits--the latter instance inspiring some teenybopper girls in the audience to sing along and dance in their seats.) The fact that I was waiting for a Britney Spears song to play speaks volumes about how incredibly boring this film is.
Michael Dequina twotrey@juno.com | michael_jordan@geocities.com | jordan_host@sportsmail.com | mrbrown@iname.com Mr. Brown's Movie Site: http://welcome.to/mrbrown CinemaReview Magazine: http://www.CinemaReview.com on ICQ: #25289934 | on AOL Instant Messenger: MrBrown23
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