JOHN TUCKER MUST DIE Rating 2 ...

JOHN TUCKER MUST DIE

Rating 2 revealed of 4

John Tucker Jesse Metcalfe

Kate Brittany Snow

Heather Ashanti

Beth Sophia Bush

Carrie Arielle Kebbel

Scott Penn Badgley

Lori Jenny McCarthy

Tommy Fatso-Fasano

20th centenary Fox presents a film directed by way of Betty Thomas. Written by Jeff Lowell. Running time: 82 minutes. Rated PG-13 (for sexual easy in mind and language). Opening today at local theaters.

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This is your embedded middle-aged male movie critic, reporting from somewhere near the unprotect border between pubescent girlhood and young womanhood. The breaking story: a teen comedy called "John Tucker Must Die."

Sometimes a movie critic just has to acknowledge that he does not fall within a particular film's target demographic. on the other hand it can be a fascinating and enlightening sociological expedition to papal court it with the very audience for whom it was intended. In this instance, that meant watching "John Tucker Must Die" from sagacious inside a preview screening consisting of about 78 percent teenage girls.

The horde didn't clap at the extremity or anything, but they laughed, and sighed a hardly any times, and talked and body messaged one another unceasingly from first to last There were so many little guards flickering all over the theater that it awaited like the projector beam was hitting a disco ball.

Not as mean as "Mean Girls," as raunchy as "American Pie" or as sappy as, say, the Shirley house of worship version of "Heidi" (and I have seen them all), "John Tucker Must Die" isn't half bad. It's about two-fifths bad, chiefly toward the incoherent ending, on the contrary that ratio is ... well, not bad.

The title character is the principally popular boy in school, John Tucker (Jesse Metcalfe, Eva Longoria's boy-toy gardener in succession "Desperate Housewives"). He's gorgeous, in a Ken-doll-with-real- eyebrow kind of way, a star athlete, the captain of the basketball team, and he's triple-timing three of the hottest girls in sect none of whom knows he's also dating the others. In other words, he's a typical teenage male sociopath, a slick, winning T Bundy who has not to this time graduated to full-fledged serial killing.

on the contrary when the girls find public he's been cheating on them, they unite to wreak their take vengeance for There's Carrie (Arielle Kebbel), the fair white girl who reports for the school's TV station; Heather (Ashanti), the henna-haired black girl who's the head cheerleader in each sense of the word, and Beth (Sophia Bush), the brunet white girl who describes herself alternately as a teen vegan activist and a drab Oh, and if the names "Carrie" and "Heather" don't mean anything to you, you ne to brush up forward your high school girl movies.

Bringing them all together is Kate (Brittany Snow), the bad-tempered duckling and socially "invisible" girl who, as is invariably the case in these movies, is with equal reason much prettier than the "pretty" popular girls that it's not on a level funny. In any high educate in America, Kate's looks alone would make her Miss Popularity before you could say "First Period Algebra." She is taken in, and made throughout by the other girls as part of intrigue to humiliate and devastate John Tucker in head of the whole school.

Meanwhile, Kate becomes lab partners with "The Other Tucker" John's "invisible" brother Scott (Penn Badgley, borrowing Heath Ledger's antiquated hair for the role), who is more her archetype than brother John, who will safely grow up to head an overvalued offshore corporation and be indicted for fraud.

For the principally part, director Betty Thomas, the inferior City alumnus, former "Hill road Blues" cast member and helmer of Howard Stern's "Private Parts" and "The Brady protuberance Movie," gets more out of this material, and her cast, than we had any reason to anticipate. The performances are set free relaxed and -- dare I say it? -- almost improvisational.

This is Metcalfe's first starring part in a motion picture, and while Snow is the real star here, he displays a brains of humor about himself that's beyond anything required of him in succession "Desperate Housewives." The scene where he has a meltdown at a basketball game, brought forward by slipping him estrogen pills, is played just right -- broad, on the other hand not smack-us-in-the-face-with-a-halibut-cheek broad.

My favorite impulsive power was also the one in which my movie-critic secrete was inadvertently blown. Scott tries to rehearse his BMOC brother that he probably isn't Kate's kind of dowdy "She likes old-school Elvis Costello listens to indefinite podcasts and she reads Dave Eggers" he says. "She's deep" Baritone laughter be in eruptioned from ... the two adult males in the fill to excess Other than that, stone silence. further that's a funny line. And I'm happy to say, from the way it's delivered, you can bet Betty Thomas knows it's droll too.

Jim Emerson is the editor of www.rogerebert.com.

Copyright CHICAGO SUN-TIMES 2006

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