FLIP FLOP

REVIEWED - STICK IT: LOATHE gymnastics? Then Stick It - a sub-editor's dream of a title, incidentally - may very well be the film for you. The folks behind this tiresomely formulaic teen movie are clearly so terrified of alienating punters resistant to the supposed charms of gyrating East European midgets that they have almost completely excised parallel bars, vaulting horses and floor exercises from their stupid film.

Gymnastics do take place, you understand. But the film is cut so energetically and the visual effects are so dizzyingly showy that one gets little sense how effectively the contestants are achieving their murky objectives. Here is one young lady gyrating on the bar to a remembered hip-hop tune. Elsewhere, one of her colleagues mounts the horse and cockily offers twin hand gestures to the crowd. If you didn't want to direct a film about this odd sport, Jessica Bendinger, you need only have said.

As a further sop to surly teenagers with little time for leotards, Ms Bendinger offers us a protagonist who wears Black Flag T-shirts, scowls at everything her parents say and, despite sporting teeth as regular as tombstones in a military cemetery, otherwise demands to be regarded as a callisthenic Ché Guevara.

Jeff Bridges, unwisely resisting the temptation to put a bag over his head or don a false moustache, plays the expected surly coach with a grim past who is asked to knock wild Missy Peregrym - over whose grating performance we will draw a forgiving veil - into shape before some sort of big tournament kicks off.

"Elite gymnastics is like the Navy Seals, only harder," someone says at some point. Well, yes, except participants rarely get shot in elite gymnastics. Unfortunately.