The novel I Love You Beth Cooper was penned by Simpsons writer Larry Doyle and is very funny, sort of like a slightly edgy '80's teen flick in book form. Doyle's credited with writing the screenplay for the film adaptation, so it must fall entirely on director Chris Columbus that the movie version of Doyle's work is so thuddingly, cringe-inducingly bad. There's no other logical explanation for it.
This movie is so abominable, in fact, that if you didn't know for certain that it was directed by the same person who helmed Home Alone, Mrs. Doubtfire and two Harry Potter movies, you'd swear it was a first-time effort by someone who'd never even seen a comedy, much less directed one.
The premise is decent: Nerdy high-school valedictorian Denis Cooverman (Paul Rust) announces during his graduation speech that he loves pretty, popular cheerleader Beth Cooper (Hayden Panettiere), which sets in motion an evening of escalating mayhem. Beth's ham-headed boyfriend wants to kill him, Beth and her two cute friends road trip around town with Denis and his maybe-gay best pal Rich (Jack Carpenter), and over the course of the night Denis realizes first that his dream girl is far more flawed than he'd ever imagined, and then comes to appreciate her humanity as much as her beauty.
In the right hands, this plot -- which lays the foundation for pratfalls, car crashes, and teen humiliations galore -- could be a raucous guilty pleasure of a summer flick. But every single moment of I Love You, Beth Cooper is so tone-deaf that absolutely nothing works. The pacing is sluggish, the direction of the actors is inept, the physical framing of scenes is visually unappealing ... even the musical cues feel forced and out of sync. Set pieces end abruptly with characters moving on to the next location without discussion or explanation, as if chunks of the film were edited out on a whim. It's a mess.
20th Century Fox almost released Beth Cooper without screening it for the press, only announcing in the eleventh hour that critics would be allowed to see it ahead of time. This was a mistake. At the screening I attended, my seatmate turned to me and asked, "Did Chris Columbus suffer brain damage?" which is a reasonable question, considering that the entire movie feels as if the director has never set foot behind a camera before, and that it was edited in the back of someone's van.
It seems cruel to additionally pick on the actors in this train wreck, but 28-year-old Paul Rust was seemingly cast neither for his talent nor for any remote resemblance to a high school student, but instead for his extraordinarily large nose -- and it out-acts him in every scene. Panettiere appears unaware that she's mired in possibly the worst movie of the year, while almost every other actor moves and speaks like they're in a community theater production of Risky Business. When Alan Ruck and Cynthia Stevenson appear on screen as Denis' parents, it's as if they accidentally wandered in from a different, better movie, but then they leave again and we're trapped once more with all the badness.
In short, this is an appallingly bad movie. Stay far, far away.