DRIVE ME CRAZY (M). (Twentieth Century Fox) Director: John Schultz Stars: Melissa Joan Hart, Adrian Grenier, William Converse-Roberts, Stephen Collins Running time: 91 minutes.
Occasionally an adolescent romantic comedy will unexpectedly break out of the mould and cleverly subvert the formula (Clueless, Election, etc). Drive Me Crazy, on the other hand, steers an unadventurous course through a succession of clichés that will be immediately obvious to audiences who sat through last year's procession of bland, formulaic teen comedies. Drive Me Crazy shares numerous thematic and plot similarities with films such as She's All That, 10 Things I Hate About You and even Never Been Kissed.
While tracing the tricky path of adolescent love, Drive Me Crazy also explores the bitchy politics of high school. Drive Me Crazy offers up yet another exploration of the hierarchy of high school, from the jocks to the geeks, the elite in-crowd to the outcasts who desperately want to be accepted, from the cool to the uncool. There is also plenty of jealous plotting and subterfuge that inevitably comes to a head during the climactic school dance. This clueless comedy has been written by Rob Thomas, one of the writers on popular teen soap Dawson's Creek, but it is rather superficial stuff that lacks any real insight or freshness.
Nicole (played with some charm but a lack of real charisma by Melissa Joan Hart, better known as TV's teenage witch Sabrina) and Chase (Adrian Grenier) have lived next door to each other all their lives, but their childhood friendship has cooled. When Nicole tries to make Brad, the hunky but vapid school basketball champ, jealous, she enlists Chase's help. She pretends that she and Chase are an item. Chase is initially willing to go along with the scheme because he has just been dumped by his shrewish girl friend, and hopes to make her jealous as well. Nicole gives Chase a make over and introduces him into the school's elite, which gradually alienates him from his friends.
But sparks fly, and the pair discover that there is a chemistry between them, which leads to further complications. Drive Me Crazy essentially follows a paint by numbers scenario, and most audiences will be able to predict the outcome of this tangled web of adolescent lust and romance well before the climax. John Schultz, who gave us the moderately interesting Bandwagon last year, directs this material in surprisingly lacklustre fashion.
This innocuous and decidedly lightweight comedy will certainly appeal to its target audience, but adult audiences will probably find that it drives them to distraction.
** greg king http://www.netau.com.au/gregking
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews