Why is popularity always the reward for quirky high schoolers in movies where the whole plot is about learning to be happy without it? You don’t celebrate your twelfth step with a shot, you don’t get a mansion after reaching nirvana, but somehow our teenage morality scripts are still peddling the idea that trying to be liked is lame, but being liked because you don’t care about being liked is awesome, so do it that way instead and you’ll be happy.
So it unfortunately is with The DUFF, which follows the socially invisible Bianca Piper (Mae Whitman) through the identity crisis she experiences after being told she is the Designated Ugly Fat Friend (D.U.F.F.) among her friends. Where Bianca used to find freedom in her relative anonymity, now all she feels is the weight of outside judgment. She breaks it off with her friends in embarrassment, and after a particularly horrific public shaming on YouTube, enlists the help of her jock neighbor Wesley (Robbie Amell) to help her out of her social exile.
Based on the well-received young adult novel of the same name by Kody Keplinger, the film adaptation of The DUFF spends far too much of its time sidestepping its worthwhile premise and talented leads Whitman and Amell, choosing instead to misapply the lessons of what was clearly a careful study of Mean Girls. It’s all here: the flashy intros, the carefully defined cliques, the teachers who still feel the weight of their high school trauma. The trouble is that where Mean Girls works as a satire on social order with lessons that apply to the world beyond young women, the moral of The DUFF is “You’re a DUFF. Own your DUFFness and you can date a jock and people will like you more than the popular girl.”
Some of this could be forgiven, had there been a single laugh along the way. The DUFF suffers from that awful form of non-humor that adults write at teenagers rather than for them, full of barely coherent references to social media from “back in my day” adults. The grown-up actors are all endearingly game for a project that they understand does not belong to them—among them Ken Jeong, Chris Wylde, Romany Malco and Allison Janney—but even they are barely able to squeeze out a chuckle from their thin material.
Under normal circumstances, The DUFF would be just another unremarkable dud from a film industry that is increasingly desperate for young adult bucks, but the biggest tragedy here is that leads Whitman and Amell have stunningly good chemistry. Their scenes together crackle as much as the film allows. Bianca’s supposedly eccentric interests are quirk-by-numbers, but it’s easy to love the character thanks to a committed performance. And though we all know about Whitman’s ability to carry a scene (if only this weren’t her highest profile leading role to date), Amell is the real discovery here. His take on Wesley is believable and charming, like Stifler with a soul. Though he’s a beneficiary of the school’s social order, he’s as much a victim of it as anybody else when he wants to make his own decisions.
Laugh-free, derivative and untrue to its own stated aims, The DUFF isn’t worth anybody’s time, the talented cast included. Watch Mean Girls again, rent the horror flicks that Bianca supposedly spends all her time watching and don’t reward Hollywood’s teen-industrial complex until it gives it the depth that it deserves.
Playing this week
American Sniper
Fifty Shades of Grey
Focus
Hot Tub Time Machine 2
Jupiter Ascending
Kingsmen: The Secret Service
McFarland, USA
Paddington
The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water
Still Alice
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX
244-3213
