Amazon.com video review:
Sunny, happy Torrance (Kirsten Dunst) is the new leader of the Toros,
the cheerleading squad of Rancho Carne, an affluent San Diego high school that
has lousy football players but one hell of a cheerleading team. National
champions, they're the ones who bring in the bodies to the football games
with their award-winning moves and sassy grace, and they're poised to take
their sixth national cheer title. Torrance's new reign as cheer queen,
though, is cut short when she discovers that her snotty, duplicitous
forerunner was regularly stealing routines from the East Compton Clovers,
the hip-hop influenced cheerleaders of a poor inner city school, and
passing them off as the original work of the Toros. Scrambling to come up
with a new routine for the Toros--and do the right thing by giving the
Clovers their due--Torrance butts heads with the proud and understandably
wary Isis (Gabrielle Union), the leader of the Clovers, who wants nothing
to do with a rich blond white girl, but does want to get her squad to the
championships. Problem is, only one team can take home the national title.
Who's it gonna be?
An unexpected box-office hit in the late summer of 2000, Bring It On
is a smart, snappy teen comedy that bristles with good cheer (literally)
and lively, down-to-earth characters. The story may be fairly predictable
(who's going to win the big championship?), but director Peyton Reed and
screenwriter Jessica Bendinger have fleshed out their characters with
formidable strength and provided them with sharp dialogue. Dunst is a
radiant comedian, projecting warmth, determination, sincerity, and a
sublime airheadedness, and Union is an impressive dancer and counterpart to
Dunst, matching her admirably despite her limited onscreen time. An
excellent young supporting cast rounds out the film, most notably Eliza
Dushku (Faith of Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and Jesse Bradford
(Steven Soderbergh's King of the Hill) as siblings new to Rancho
Carne, who become Torrance's best friend and potential new boyfriend,
respectively. All in all, a pleasantly surprising and intelligent teen
movie. Don't miss the opening sequence, a hilarious send-up of all those
high school cheerleading routines you had to sit through at boring pep
rallies. --Mark Englehart
