Pride and Pom-Poms

How do I justify myself in saying that I liked Bring It On, a fluffy, peppy high school cheerleading comedy? I don't think I'm alone when I say that I rank cheerleaders next to telephone salesmen and fascist dictators on my List of Favorite People, and as a rule I generally opt out of teensploitation movies to watch things more rewarding, like Bassmaster. But-so help me God-Bring It On packs some surprises, however few and concessionary they may be.

Kirsten Dunst goes a long way toward justifying that claim as Torrance Shipman, the Mentos-commercial cheerleader captain who has to redirect her national championship squad when she finds out that her routines have been stolen from an unknown East Compton ghetto school. As main characters in teen movies go, Torrance is an anomaly: she isn't the budding star with big dreams, or the caricatured queen-bitch or the sarcastic loner. Cheerleading is Torrance's life-it's all she wants to do and all she knows how to do. As it becomes clear that the Machiavellian responsibilities of team captain are too much for this simple girl, Dunst engages her otherwise laughable role with a surprising realism. Note to Kirsten: When offered a real movie like American Beauty, please take it!

But alas, praise for Bring It On can only go so far. At its best, the film is still trifling. The dialogue ranges from cute to Saved By The Bell-ish and most of the characters remain politely in the same stereotyped categories introduced in the first five minutes, including the pretty-boy love interest (Jesse Bradford) who sustains the annoying trend of establishing a character's uniqueness and depth by attributing to him musical taste that runs along the lines of [gasp] The Clash. His sister (played by Buffy slayer-bitch Eliza Dushku) fares slightly better, wielding the sarcastic loner role as a nice foil to Dunst's naïve go-getisms as well as giving the there's-a-cheerleader-inside-of-everyone subplot some degree of success. And to be fair, Dushku has the usual bonus-she's hot.

As a subject for satire, cheerleading is hardly as original and rich as, say, student government elections. But while the script certainly doesn't hesitate to poke fun at these "dancers gone retarded," it walks the line between satirical and straight-faced while still allowing characters to maintain their dignity. They're doing something that they truly believe in, and the film demands at least some respect for that. Indeed, Bring It On manages to give a new dimension to the sport of cheerleading beyond mere teenage preening. When the original source of Torrance's routine is revealed to be from East Compton, we see a type of cheerleading with intense racial pride at its roots, rather than just pretty girls with pompoms. The fact that her squad has been stealing-and winning-with the cheers of a different racial/socioeconomic group gives Torrance's conflict a racially and morally ambiguous twist that the movie never sells out. It may be sad to say, but this little film faces issues like the pressures of adult responsibility and racial tension with more finesse and aplomb than most anything around right now. Gimme a B!