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Friday, June 16, 2000
Give it a miss, boys & girls
By RANDALL KING
Winnipeg Sun
Granted, teen magazine heartthrob Freddie Prinze Jr. made something of a splash in last year's romantic comedy She's All That.
But it's been downriver ever since.
He made an ill-advised foray into sci-fi (Wing Commander), then resumed the frontal assault on the heartstrings of pubescent girls with the abysmal, amateurish romantic-comedy Down to You.
Director Robert Iscove, the guy who made She's All That, is a comparatively sure hand than whatever film school washout created Down to You. He returns to direct Prinze again but promptly falls into the same trap as his predecessor. He has made a painfully loquacious comedy about young people in love.
Prinze is Ryan, a structural engineering student who has repeatedly encountered the same girl throughout his life. He first meets Latin major Jennifer (the adult version played by Claire Forlani) on an airplane, and is annoyed at first sight.
The two finally hook up in college, where they delay the inevitable tryst for almost a full hour, reasoning that their quirky honest friendship is too valuable to squander on a sexual fling.
It's attitudes like this that render the film as sexy as cold oatmeal.
Presumably, Prinze is attracted to these roles because he feels endless analysis of relationships offers more grown-up material than those comparatively lusty teen comedies he made before.
He is so-o-o-o wrong.
The characters in Boys and Girls are so entirely removed from sheer hormonal passion, they might as well be Wing Commander-esque aliens. These people would rather talk than do anything else. Anything.
They are navel-gazing bores. They make the film's 100-minute running time feels like a 100 hours in a home for elderly neurotics.
--AllPop
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