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Spectacular!
There are no words to
describe how appallingly mediocre this film is. By rights that means
this page should be blank, but then I wouldn’t be able to vent my fury
on the people responsible for this travesty of a production. Everything
about this film annoyed me. I feel guilty even calling it a film,
because I don’t want to give the impression that I actually consider it
a worthwhile use of film stock. I was annoyed by the jailhouse stare of
the absurdly named lead Nolan Gerard Funk, irritated by the way the box
cover repeatedly described him as a ‘bad boy’, irked by the synopsis
writer’s use of the expression ‘bring it’. In short, I was in a bad
mood before I’d watched a single frame, and I don’t even really get in
bad moods. His name is Nolan Gerard Funk, for Christ’s sake.
At any rate, the action
opens with Nikko (Funk) working the crowd as frontman for his band
Flux. He is such a bad boy! My word is he bad. ‘They say stop but I
say go’ he sings while clad in an overly tight shirt, flopping his
carefully dishevelled hair about in dramatic fashion. ‘Don’t tell me
what I gotta do.’ See? Ever so bad.
This posturing twit is,
in fact, so bad that the rest of the band can’t stand his badness, and
kick him out in order to look for a singer who has equally nice hair but
is slightly less bad. When his woman breaks up with him as well,
budding singer Courtney (Home & Away’s Tammin Sursok) is
literally waiting in the wings to invite him into her own band, and I
presume were the film not G rated, her bed. She needs a bad boy with a
nice set of pipes, you see, to snatch a national performance
championship from her rival Tammi.
Mining the same formula
as more polished and successful efforts like Step Up and High
School Musical, this can only really appeal to naive youngsters
clutching their Bratz dolls or the recently lobotomised. I’m sorry, but
it really just isn’t very good. Funk is irksome in his relentless
efforts to be edgy and hip, and for my money simply doesn’t pull it
off. Sursok is a fine actress and the ensemble cast do a respectable
job, but the songs (courtesy of the HSM music team, no less) are
generic and the plot crawls along before arriving at its ‘surprise’
conclusion.
I have nothing against
films aimed at teens. I thought 17 Again had many truly
hilarious moments and can see the appeal of the recent crop of dance
movies and musicals targeting younger audiences. But this formulaic and
uninspiring effort should not be viewed by anyone, ever.
Special Features
Spectacular! Video Diary
3 Behind the Scenes
Featurettes
2 Music Videos
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