Never Been Kissed (1999)

Never Been Kissed is a 1999 romantic comedy about a twenty-five-year-old newspaper copy editor who goes undercover at her old high school and discovers that adolescent cruelty has not improved in the intervening years. The film moves with the pleasant, slightly desperate energy of a studio comedy that knows its premise is thin and hopes Barrymore's charm will cover the structural cracks. It mostly works, though the charm is doing a great deal of unpaid labor.

The social consciousness on display is of a modest, late-century kind. Minority performers appear in the ensemble, but they hover at the edges of the story, present enough to be noticed and not enough to require the screenplay to notice them back. The romantic architecture remains orthodox: a woman is humiliated, learns a lesson about self-worth, and is rewarded by a man arriving late to kiss her in public. There is a brief flicker of suspicion toward tabloid journalism and the editor who wants a scoop, though the film treats this as a workplace inconvenience, not a system worth dismantling.

The moral center arrives at the prom, where Josie throws away her crown and informs the student body that high school personas mean nothing in the real world. The scene is earnest and a little preachy, and the film keeps returning to the same lesson about kindness and the cruelty of popular cliques. The film remains a gentle, dated comedy with a cult following and no interest in the newer vocabularies of identity, climate, or neurodivergence. It wants us to be nicer to the Denominators. That is the whole program.