OH, BOY

REVIEWED - SHE'S THE MAN: GIVEN the various indignities visited upon William Shakespeare's work over the past few centuries, the Bard's remains must be quite exhausted from spinning about their axes.

Those sad bones, upon hearing that the writers of Legally Blonde were to turn Twelfth Night into a high-school comedy featuring Vinnie Jones, may, quite reasonably, have prepared themselves for another twirl. What next? Mike Tyson as Prospero? Phil "The Power" Taylor as Richard III?

As it happens, Jones's enthusiastically gruff performance is about the most diverting thing in this mirth-free, unattractively shot romp. The sometime Gascoigne-castrator plays the coach of the boys' soccer team at a posh school. When young Viola (Amanda Bynes), a sportsperson of note, learns that the authorities at her own school are terminating the female footie programme, she throws on her brother's clothes and signs up to be shouted at by Mr Jones.

Shakespearian scholars may be surprised by what follows. Students of John Hughes's teen comedies will not. Bynes has a gay friend under whose tutelage she learns to walk with a shoulder-led swagger. A nerd with braces and glasses gains a sort of confidence. Bitches get their comeuppance. Pompous teachers learn humility.

More of the play survives than is strictly necessary. Indeed, disentangling the confusion of interweaving romances requires a greater intellectual investment than the meagre comic returns could ever hope to justify.

Such gender-swap farces do, however, stand or fall on the ability of the lead to pick up and drop y-chromosomes at leisure. Sad to relate, young Miss Bynes, Hilary Duff minus all the challenging edges, is quite hopeless in her male incarnation. So odd is her performance that anybody wandering into the cinema unaware of the plot may quite possibly fail to discern that she is even trying to be a boy.

The willingness of her classmates, all of whom seem to be played by Ryan Philippe, to accept as a guy this odd little gamine with her puzzling southern accent lends the film the quality of a Luis Buñuel comedy. Avoid.