She’s the Man

Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night becomes the story of a teenager (Amanda Bynes) who poses as her own brother (James Kirk). She plans to get on the soccer team and prove that she’s as good as any boy—but she finds herself falling for the team’s star player (Channing Tatum), who also happens to be her/his roommate. There’s nothing wrong with transplanting the Bard to an American high school—sometimes it’s good fun (see 10 Things I Hate About You), and if nothing else, it can give teenagers a leg up when they finally get around to reading the play. But here, what very little wit is in Ewan Leslie, Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith’s script is pounded to pulp by Andy Fickman’s crude direction. The movie is noisy, obnoxious and wildly overacted, as if Fickman planned it to play only on a Sony PSP.