Directed by Will Gluck. Starring Emma Stone, Penn Badgley, Amanda Bynes, Thomas Haden Church, Patricia Clarkson, Cam Gigandet, Lisa Kudrow, Malcolm McDowell, Alyson Michalka, Stanley Tucci 15A cert, gen release, 92 min
A HIGH school retooling of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Easy Acasts fille du jour Emma Stone (Spiderman's new Mary Jane) as Olive, a well-rounded virginal student whose fib about a one-night stand escalates into a faux prostitution racket.
Once word gets around, our heroine, a smart, sassy girl with a wicked knack for one-liners and factoids, imagines she has nothing left to lose and wholly commits to her inner-slapper while maintaining an unbreachable hymen. Lowering her neckline and hiking up her hems, Olive accidentally stumbles into a small business enterprise. It’s a pretty sweet deal: she pretends to have notched up some of her geekier fellow students on her bedpost; they, in return, shower her with gift vouchers and enjoy their new schoolyard designation as teenage studs.
Olive’s hip parents (played by hip actors Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson) are a little concerned, as is her favourite teacher (the equally hip Thomas Haden Church). Our girl, however, remains convinced that she can cope with the slings and arrows. Who cares what her bitchy former best friend (Aly Michalka) and her nasty, self-righteous Christian classmate (Amanda Bynes) think, right?
Olive does, of course, but, by the time she realises it, she’s already the campus skank. Can her squeaky- clean reputation ever be restored?
Consistently amusing rather than properly funny, Easy Arepeatedly curtseys before the great teen movies of yore. To this end, there's more than a touch of John Hughes in the writing and a good deal of Cluelessin the reliance on voiceover. This film wants to be Heathers. It wants to be Mean Girls. But, like, you know? Even the brilliant ensemble cast can't cover for the undeveloped final act.
Easy Amay be a warm and witty addition to a genre known for indolence and cliché, but a stone-cold classic? As if.
