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Take one sexually inexperienced straight-A student (Say Anything) who's the most popular girl at her West Coast high school (Clueless). Throw in a pushy dad determined to send his kid to college (Some Kind Of Wonderful), a raucous frat party (Animal House) and a boy from the wrong side of the tracks (The Breakfast Club). Add a suicide (Heathers, Pump Up The Volume, Dead Poets Society), re-heat and serve.
Tastes lousy, doesn't it? Yet these are the ingredients for Girl, a crashingly predictable coming-of-age tale that recycles every rites-of-passage cliché cooked up by Hollywood.
Accompanied throughout by a knowing voiceover, lashings of hip slang (""That was dope!"" / ""I'm all over it!"") and the now-obligatory MTV soundtrack, Girl is a 90-minute problem page tackling such thorny issues as bullying and bulimia. Sometimes it's wise to its preachy tone - - Andrea's stuffy pa using a banana and a condom to illustrate safe sex, for example - - but elsewhere it's painfully po-faced (viz the time when one character tops himself because he misses out on a record contract).
Adapted from Blake Nelson's novel, Girl has a single gag - - our heroine declares something in her voiceover before totally contradicting herself on screen - - that's repeated ad infinitum, ad nauseam. And whenever the narrative flags - - which is often - - we get a rotten ballad from Flanery.
Swain proves there is life after Lolita, and she's ably supported by a fresh-faced cast that includes Cruel Intentions starlet Blair and Clea DuVall from The Faculty. But do we really need more movies about self-obsessed nymphettes and their disappearing hymens? Thank God Kurt Cobain never saw Girl. He might have done something really foolish.
Everything you ever wanted to know about the life of a teenage groupie but couldn't be bothered to ask. Like a movie version of Just Seventeen, Girl has double helpings of adolescent angst but only a side order of limp wit.
The Total Film team are made up of the finest minds in all of film journalism. They are: Editor Jane Crowther, Deputy Editor Matt Maytum, Reviews Ed Matthew Leyland, News Editor Jordan Farley, and Online Editor Emily Murray. Expect exclusive news, reviews, features, and more from the team behind the smarter movie magazine.

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