FilmBlather.com

I have yet to join the wide-spread rebellion against the prevalent "teeny-bopper" flicks because I've enjoyed a good chunk of them. She's All That, 10 Things I Hate About You and American Pie were all perfectly entertaining, good-natured, sweet films for the younger generation. It's a shame, then, that the movie slated to kick off the latter third of 1999 is the teen comedy at its very worst. Drive Me Crazy is genuinely inept; a wretched movie that not only misses the current social point by a long shot but one that fails to entertain as well.

Melissa Joan Hart, who achieved fame by starring in Clarissa Explains it All, a terrific kids series on Nickelodeon and more recently the TGIF staple Sabrina, the Teenage Witch, attempts to make her crossover to the big screen with this woefully misguided production. Hart is a terrific actress, mind, but she fails to make much of a splash; this project is not a good choice to showcase her talents. In any event, the 23 year old plays Nicole, a high-school senior responsible for organizing "The Centennial", a dance extravaganza celebrating the anniversary of her school. She also lusts after the hunky Brad and she yearns for him to ask her to the Centennial, but he has a thing for a stereotypically airheaded cheerleader from a neighboring school.

As the big day nears, Brad still hasn't come to his senses and Nicole still doesn't have a date. She turns desperate, fearing humiliation if she goes to the party dateless. She decides that, since she is desperate, its time for her to take desperate measures. She turns to her good-looking but antisocial, sloppy neighbor named Chase (Adrian Grenier). He agrees to go with her and its up to Nicole to turn him from the rebel disliked by everyone outside of his limited clique into a socially acceptable date.

Chase's makeover alienates his similarly unpopular pals, who become angry at him for abandoning them for her. This provides a good opportunity for the film to make a point to the kids that will watch it but alas the abandoned stay abandoned and Chase changes his style in order to fit in with the crowd and become a good date. He mingles with the social elite and he likes it, never thinking of the real friends he left behind.

Drive Me Crazy was originally titled "Next to You", but the moniker was changed when some cretin at 20th Century Fox decided to name the movie after a song by Britney Spears which happens to appear on the soundtrack. It's never a good omen when the title of a movie is decided by music rather than by, say, the plot. It only gets worse. This is a slow-moving, unfunny movie, where the characters seem to act the way they do for the sole purpose of boring the audience to death. There is nobody to care about here; everyone is equally snobbish and unlikeable. In the middle of the movie I began to wish these stultifyingly uninteresting people would simply disappear; it would not make much of a difference. In fact, I could very well choose watching a black screen for two hours rather than suffering through this unbelievably turgid affair.

The extent of the emotional response elicited from me by this motion picture was unremarkable: I chuckled once. Perhaps smiled once or twice. That's it. No sympathy was generated by the characters or the situations they were in; nor were there laughs present. Drive Me Crazy's script is utterly pathetic, a collection of clichés assembled in an unappealing order, without even a witty one-liner here and there to spice things up a little.

10 Things I Hate About You and She's All That were both nice films about being yourself and not being ashamed of who you are. They spoke to teenagers on their level without condescending or preaching. This, on the other hand is a conformist movie, promoting exactly the kind of elitist attitude that's alienating kids in high-schools everywhere. Artistically incompetent and morally corrupt, Drive Me Crazy is worthless.