Three teenagers two-timed by a local lothario decide to turn the tables on him in this romantic comedy. John Tucker (Jesse Metcalfe) is the big man on campus at his high school -- he's the captain and star player of the basketball team, he's got money, he's good-looking and charming, and he can have any girl he wants. However, the latter attribute is about to get him in serious trouble when three different girls at his school -- Heather (Ashanti), Beth (Sophia Bush) and Carrie (Arielle Kebbel)
-- discover they've all been dating John at the same time. Determined to bring down the campus ladykiller, the girls devise a plan -- they pick a cute but socially clumsy girl who is new at school, Kate (Brittany Snow), and give her a crash course in stealing John's heart. Once Kate has John wrapped around her little finger, she's supposed to drop him like a bad habit and give him a taste of what heartbreak is really like. However, it seems that the early stages of the plan work a little too well, and John and Kate end up falling for each other for real. John Tucker Must Die also stars Jenny McCarthy, Penn Badgley, and Dan Payne. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi
Betty Thomas's sloppy storytelling and comic incompetence can be forgiven but to portray young women as flighty airheads obsessed with boys over all else is downright offensive.
Buoyed by its good looking cast and entertaining script, John Tucker Must Die is witty and funny, as it reminds us that it is cool to be yourself - whoever you are.
There are three aspects to a comedy that should immediately tell you it's something terrible: 1. It's unrealistic. 2. Laughing takes effort. 3. By the ending, you are convinced you have psychic abilities because you predicted the way the film would close within the first five minutes. Alongside all the terrible
performances and countless scenes of humiliation that is bound to elicit lots of eye-rolling, JOHN TUCKER MUST DIE is a film defined in its entirety by those three components.Maybe if this were something like a two-minute YouTube video staging the humiliation of a high school ladies' man, it would be watchable and even possibly cute. But with 89 minutes (praise the Lord it's no longer!) of behind-the-scenes filled with eye-rollers and insiders on girl talk that are supposed to be funny, the humiliation scenes (especially the one in which the girls cause John Tucker to break out crying in front of the whole school during a basketball game) just don't even remotely work out. The film just tries and tries (and tries) ever so terribly hard, but it never gets anywhere.Full Review: http://themoviefreakblog.wordpress.com/2011/11/23/review-john-tucker-must-die/
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