John Tucker Must Die (2006)

The 2006 teen comedy John Tucker Must Die arrives with a premise that reads like a focus group transcript: three girls from different cliques discover they share a boyfriend, and they enlist a fourth to break his heart. Betty Thomas directs with the efficient shrug of a veteran who has done this before. The film is loose in its debts to Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor and tighter in its debts to every high school revenge picture of the preceding decade.

The ensemble is noticeably integrated for its genre and era, with Ashanti cast as one of the wronged and a supporting roster drawn from assorted social strata. The film never mentions this. Race is not a subject here, and the casting functions as ordinary teen-comedy arithmetic. The gender politics are more deliberate and more muddled. A sisterhood of aggrieved girls unites against a serial cheater, and the script gestures toward the idea that a woman's life should not orbit a man. It cannot hold the pose. Kate's closing realization, that plotting against John and dating John amount to the same devotion, is a genuine flicker of self-awareness, and the film immediately trades it for a cake fight.

Any ethical instruction is administered lightly, in the manner of a vitamin slipped into a milkshake. The movie wants to be liked more than it wants to be right. It sits in the middle of its own ambitions, a revenge comedy that flinches at revenge and a romance that distrusts romance. We are left with a competent, amiable artifact of the Myspace era, an artifact that raises questions of female solidarity and then declines to answer them. The classification is straightforward. The film gestures at social consciousness the way a teenager gestures at a curfew, briefly and without conviction. The sommelier notes a pleasant nose of girl power, a thin body, and a finish that evaporates before the credits finish rolling.