Theatrical Reviews: The DUFF

I have almost no reason to ever bother watching High-school Teen-girl movies.  I am not a girl, I am not a teen, and I’m constantly trying to forget that I was ever in High-School.  In other-words: This genre of movie is not really meant for me.  I’ve seen a solid hand-full, but as a rule I don’t have much use for them.

The DUFF, the latest high-school teen-girl movie to be released in theaters, could have easily been another in a line of pointless unfunny comedies, but instead it works thanks to a great cast, and decent filmmaking.

Now before you rush off to IMDB to see what famous comedic geniuses are starring in this film, I’ll let you know that there aren’t any.  The movie is mostly made up of actors who you’ve either never seen before, or only maybe seen once for a minute.  The group however do a perfect job with the borderline-obnoxious material, and often manage to render funny things that have no business being funny.

On paper the DUFF is somewhat frustrating, but on screen it is surprisingly enjoyable.  This is mostly due to the fact that the characters aren’t soulless caricatures of puberty, but instead mostly-likable characters with identities.  It’s the great cast that brings this flick to life; The DUFF would have probably been a disaster without the talents of Mae Whitman and Robbie Amell to keep things going.

The plot itself is a little juvenile, and has been kind of beaten to death.  A new dress and a make-over are the cure-all for the protagonist’s insecurity problems, and the two leads start out as friends then slowly develop feelings for each other as the film progresses.  The female lead is an average looking teen in a world full of apparently more attractive teens (you can tell that the other girls are more attractive because they wear more lipstick,)  and the most beautiful of them all is, of course, a psychotic jerk to the others.  There is a lot of annoying paint-by-the-numbers tropes in The DUFF.

I’d say that the movie is just a lame girly teen-movie with a stellar cast; but I think there might be something lying under the skin of The DUFF that its genre predecessors do not have.  The movie is about dealing with your own inadequacies and insecurities, and it talks about this matter in a surprisingly mature way.  Everyone has to find a way to cope with the fact that there will always be someone better than them around the corner; and while The DUFF doesn’t create a particularly sane way of dealing with this problem, at least it admits that there is one.

At its core The DUFF is an escapist wish-fulfillment picture for a demographic that I am in no way a part of.  I have no desire to go shop for new outfits, tell that jerk girl at school what’s coming to her or date the muscular school jock;  yet I still found the movie fairly charming and enjoyable thanks to its smart-ish script and fantastic cast.  I can only imagine that the films target audience will enjoy it 10 times more then I did.  It shows the kind of life that can be breathed into a tired sub-genre when the filmmakers actually care about what they are putting on-screen.  Good show.