Head Over Heels

Starring Freddie Prinze Jr. and Monica Potter; Shalom Harlow, Ivana Milicevic, Sarah O'Hare, Tomiko Fraser and China Chow
Screenplay by Ron Burch and David Kidd
Story by John J. Strauss, Ed Decter, David Kidd and Ron Burch
Directed by Mark Waters
website: www.headoverheels.net

IN SHORT: 2% story. 98% waste of time. [Rated PG-13. minutes]

What do you get when you mix a light romantic comedy with no story with a pair of you'll-talk-about-'em-afterwards bathroom jokes and a third act which feels like a thriller that never got out of project development stage at an independent studio? You get Head Over Heels, which features a chemistry-free pair of lead actors and four supermodels given no chance to show that supermodels are anything more than pretty faces that can't act.

"Four Million guys in New York City," moans the could-be model pretty if she wore a little makeup Amanda Pierce (Monica Potter), to a lesbian coworker at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as Head Over Heels begins, "why can't I find one good one?"

It's because we're sitting in the back row of screenings of weakly scripted movies like this one . . . and in a couple of days I'll get email from a fifteen year old girl castigating me for dissing the "best Freddie Prinze movie ever!" She will make that statement because Prinze does only what he has to do to make fifteen year old girls weak in the knees. He smiles. As for Amanda, her knees go out at the drop of a hat, one of two running gags in the film.

The other gag involves the surgical life of would-be supermodels, of whom there are four: Jade (Shalom Harlow), Roxanna (Ivana Milicevic), Candi (Sarah O'Hare) and Holly (Tomiko Fraser), all Amanda's new-found roommates in a huge, high-class New York City apartment. The models don't present any competition for Amanda, indeed they spend most of their time trying to fix up their new best friend with Jim Winston (Prinze), the cute guy in the building across the street. Jim has something to do with the fashion industry, too, but what that job may be isn't clear. Could there be competition between Amanda and the models for the eye of Jim? Nope. Could the plain jane Amanda ever truly run with her new pack of roommates? Director Mark Waters allows the answer to be revealed far too soon in his movie and even that comes long after anyone with a single digit IQ has figured it out.

As for the models, we're not about to fall back on stereotype and say real-life models can't act. We've seen Harlow before and she can. None of the four are given much to do except flounce around onscreen and look pretty. For the kidlets in the audience, the boys get to see models as half naked as a PG-13 rating will allow. The girls get to see Freddie Prinze naked and sweaty. That's about it.

It took four grown up men to come up with this story, folks, three quarters of which is Amanda telling Jim she doesn't want to go out with him. The "story by" credit goes to the guys who wrote There's Something About Mary, and their jokes stand out against the utterly unengaging story.

Finally we get to the Third Act, most of which is spent by Amanda trying to convince her roomies, and the New York City Police Department, that she saw Jim take a baseball bat to the head of yet another model, Megan O'Brien (Tanya Reichert). There is a logical explanation, of course, but it's dumped on you in a frenzy of secret identities and gunshots and car chases, all out of place in what is never more than a feeble, featherweight romantic comedy.

On average, a first run movie ticket will run you Eight Bucks. Were Cranky able to set his own price to Head Over Heels, he would have paid...

$2.00

Head Over Heels is barely a dateflick for teens. For those of parenting age, like us, there's nothing here that would confuse a ten year old .

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