So Undercover (2012)

So Undercover arrives with the confidence of a film that knows exactly what it is and has decided that is sufficient. Miley Cyrus plays Molly Morris, a Dallas private investigator who photographs cheating husbands until the FBI recruits her to pose as a sorority sister and guard the daughter of a man tangled up in an organized crime case. The premise is a wardrobe swap and a fish-out-of-water gag, executed with the enthusiasm of a direct-to-video release that spent two years waiting for a distribution deal. The poster borrows its composition from Mean Girls, which tells us plenty about the ambitions on offer.

What the film does possess is a competent woman at the center of the machinery. Molly is good at her job, smarter than the agents who hire her, and the final act hands the rescue to her and the sorority sisters working as a unit. This is standard genre competence, the kind that has powered caper comedies for decades. It is not a thesis. The makeover sequence, in which a streetwise investigator is sanded down into something a chapter house will accept, runs on inherited assumptions about beauty and belonging without pausing to interrogate them. The sisters remain a homogeneous group, and the screenplay has no interest in what that homogeneity might mean.

Elsewhere the film is content to be a lightweight caper. Race never surfaces as subject or subtext. There is no engagement with class, no environmental conscience, no neurodivergent perspective, no historical revision, and no messaging of any kind. The climax involves a corrupt federal agent, a kidnapped heiress, and a rescue plan assembled by college students. That is the whole of its moral universe, and the film seems untroubled by the smallness of it. A 6% rating on Rotten Tomatoes suggests audiences were similarly untroubled by the film itself.