PREMIERE.COM'S MOVIE REVIEW (posted 7/28/06)

In the tradition of bubblegum teen comedies with an overt "message," John Tucker Must Die is the timeworn story of teenage girls attempting to give a notorious player his just desserts. John Tucker has looks, a star position on the basketball team, and ladies – a few too many of them. Unfortunately, his harem of bitter exes embodies painfully stereotypical teen movie characters; among them, the smart overachiever (Arielle Kebbel), the tree-hugging activist (Sophia Bush), and the sassy head cheerleader (Ashanti).

The three victims join forces in transforming another girl, Kate (Brittany Snow), the sweet, bookish type, into an ultra-desirable superbabe so she can then break Tucker's heart after he falls for her. If you've seen pretty much any plain-jane-turned-hottie flick (She's All That et. al.), you'll see the inevitable twist involving the pair actually start to fall for each other coming from a mile away.

Jenny McCarthy returns to the screen as Kate's mother (because no post-millennial teen comedy would be complete without a MILF), but the dynamic between the straight-laced, quasi-feminist Kate and her submissive, promiscuous, blonde bombshell of a mother is an extremely forced subplot that's ineffectively ironic.

Any moviegoer who has seen the trailer (or any teen movie ever) won't go in expecting anything more than familiar entertainment with a few laughs. And despite the fact that John Tucker borrows a barrage of overused concepts from the genre, it does manage to meet those minimum expectations. It functions well as a guilty pleasure that has some smile-worthy gags alongside the occasional Farrelly Brothers style gross-out moment (one scene involves an anti-herpes panel of teens with oozing cold sores).

At its core, the movie attempts to leave its young target demographic with the standard message that it's important to be honest and true to one's self in a world full of players and playahaters. Although mixing teen humor with sentiment will never be done as well as in American Pie, John Tucker Must Die has just enough heart to entertain the MySpace set. — Nick Taylor