Dan regrettably must watch
I had long been curious about John Tucker Must Die. I am a pig who will wallow in any high school slop made within a decade or so radius of my own graduation, and this one (which matches my graduation year exactly) has a few things going for it beyond the genre baseline: a killer title, a poster that caught my eye and my imagination, and a cast of actors I recognize but who never quite crossed into overexposure. My wife and I were on vacation last week, away from our usual streaming options, and there it was on Tubi. We said “what the hey.”
Sadly, “what the hey” is more or less where the movie tops out. It’s intermittently funny-ish, clever-ish, smart-ish, good-ish. To be clear, I will gladly take any number of good-ish high school comedies you want to throw at me, but I can’t in good conscience push this one on anyone who isn’t already a genre die-hard.
The film, directed and co-written by Betty Thomas, is a loose retelling of The Merry Wives of Windsor by way of a much more direct debt to Mean Girls: a new girl infiltrates the popular ecosystem pretending to be something she isn’t, only to risk becoming the thing she set out to destroy. The wrinkle here is that the “thing” is the girlfriend of a cheating D-bag: the titular John Tucker (Jesse Metcalfe), a three-timing basketball star whose jilted exes – Heather (Ashanti), Beth (Sophia Bush), and Carrie (Arielle Kebbel) – recruit transfer student Kate (Brittany Snow) as their instrument of revenge.
Which brings me to that title. John Tucker Must Die is a great title. It promises a nasty little revenge comic-thriller, a villain worth loathing, some social bloodletting. The movie then proceeds to do almost none of that. Tucker’s death is never remotely on the table; the recurring mechanism is that he talks his way out of every social cruelty inflicted upon him by Kate and co., so that the cruelties aren’t cruelties at all, just minor embarrassments. His final comeuppance is someone saying a few words about him onstage. The film frequently drifts into the register of a breezy romcom between John and Kate, which makes for an easy watch but a less memorable one than the mean little movie it occasionally threatens to become. The third act, in particular, collapses whatever satirical momentum the first half scrapes together; the revenge engine just sort of coasts to a stop at a big party, and then everyone shakes hands.
The worst pulled punch comes from a truly miserable character, both in writing and performance, in Kate’s hot, easy mom Lori (Jenny McCarthy). She ends up having nothing of substance to do the entire story. Why introduce a Chekhov’s hot mom and then give her nothing to do except nag the teens?
Where the movie does work, it works because of the teen cast made mostly of then-TV actors. Bush is the comedic MVP by a wide margin, bringing a snap and comic timing to her promiscuous hippie character. Future TV serial killer Penn Badgley, as Tucker’s weirdly intense younger brother Scott, is the film’s secret weapon; Badgley gets the best line delivery in the movie, a quasi-ironic bit about Kate being “deep” because she listens to Elvis Costello and podcasts that cracked me up. The script absolutely underuses him. Snow’s Kate is written too blandly to anchor anything, but Snow herself is so winsome and likable that I honestly think she might be better in the role than Lindsay Lohan is in Mean Girls; I’d need to rewatch both to be sure. Even Metcalfe, who’s saddled with the movie’s identity crisis, has a weirdly charming screen presence; he’s playing heartwarming romcom lead in a script that half-wants him to be a sleazy villain. It’s easy to imagine him as a charismatic heartthrob in slightly different material.
The gag hit rate is a coin flip. For every funny bit, e.g. Tucker getting tricked into wearing a thong, which starts as a visual shock-joke but becomes a well-structured gag once the whole basketball team adopts them as a jockstrap replacement and instantly starts dunking on opponents due to the improved mobility, there’s a stinker, the worst being a truly cringeworthy sequence where his sports drink gets spiked with estrogen and he becomes “sensitive” and limp-wristed for a scene.
But if you’re just here for the mid-00s flavor, John Tucker Must Die delivers. The soundtrack is very doing its job (I counted three needle drops in the last scene alone): OK Go, The All-American Rejects, Motion City Soundtrack, a veritable mid-2000s pop-punk smorgasbord. The fashion is a terrific time capsule, too, like opening an aged American Eagle or Forever 21 catalog.
The film is a diverting 89 minutes, then, and a lot of missed potential and uneven writing. But it’s watchable, with a quirky cast, and if you’re jonesing for that specific mid-00s energy, there are worse things to say “what the hey” to.
Is It Good?
Nearly Good (4/8)
Dan is the founder and head critic of The Goods. Follow Dan on Letterboxd. Join the Discord for updates and discussion.