Directed by Andy Fickman. Starring Kristen Bell, Jamie Lee Curtis, Sigourney Weaver, Odette Yustman, Betty White, Victor Garber, James Wolk G cert, gen release, 110 min
This weirdly misogynistic comedy will leave everyone hissing, writes DONALD CLARKE
CAN AMERICAN high schools really be as ghastly as the movies suggest? If horrible little squibs such as You Again are to be believed, such institutions are more comprehensively traumatising than trench warfare. It’s time the UN intervened.
Some years after leaving the frontline, Marni (Kristen Bell) has shed her braces, grown out of her spots and secured a glamorous job in PR (or something). Those memories of taunts in the gym and slights in the corridor have finally drifted into the temporal mist.
The horror returns with a sickening judder when Marni discovers that her brother’s fiancee is her former tormentor in chief. Vulpine in the manner of Megan Fox, this Joanna (Odette Yustman), largely unchanged since school, swans into town and begins pointing her lethal charm at every relative and acquaintance. She seems, however, to remember nothing about poor old Marni.
More horrible revelations are to follow. It seems that Joanna’s beloved Aunt Ramone (coasting Sigourney Weaver) was a high school rival of Marni’s mom (barely conscious Jamie Lee Curtis). The last few scenes reveal that one more generation (the unstoppable Betty White is on board) also suffered in a similar manner, but space and lack of interest prohibit us explaining any further.
Despite the presence of some first-rate talent, there really is nothing much to like about You Again. For starters, the film is all scenario and no plot. Once the relationships have been established, it flails hopelessly around for the remaining 90 minutes without revealing any fresh twists or reversals.
Moreover, the writers seem desperately undecided as to the current attitude of Joanna. At times, she appears a changed woman, worthy of pity rather than scorn, whose treatment of Marni is a result of shame or genuine forgetfulness. At others, her every move seems a gambit in a continuing campaign to crush the weak and embarrass the ugly. It’s as if, halfway through a late rewrite, the scribes got distracted by a passing firetruck and ended up leaving the thing a crossbred, Cronenbergian monster.
All that would be excusable if there weren't such a nasty undercurrent to You Again. It's not just that, by only permitting Marni happiness when she loses her acne and gets a cool job, the film seems as appalled by supposed "losers" as the savage bullies.
The entire enterprise is suffused with a mid-level hatred of women and all their wretched accoutrements. Each female character is, to some extent, driven by jealousy, resentment or spite. Whereas the men (boring it must be said) are propelled through life by a fuzzy empathy, the distaff contingent works hard at satisfying every negative assumption in The Misogynist’s Handbook.
The fact that Curtis and Weaver agreed to take part in the unlovely venture makes it seem all the more reprehensible. Halloween and Alien, those actors’ breakthrough films, demonstrated that mainstream cinema could offer us hugely strong female characters who were not harridans or maniacs.
What a squalid betrayal. What a nasty taste in the mouth. What a dizzying leap backwards. Sex and the City 2 suddenly seems a bit less reactionary.
Just a bit, mind.
