She's the Man: Critic Reviews

Bynes, with her chipmunk cheeks and goggly eyes, comes off more like some bizarre third sex -- Davy Jones after an infusion of estrogen.

The ensuing complications -- romantic, social, sporty -- are modeled on Twelfth Night, although the tone of the movie (hysterical peppiness) and style of acting (emphatic grotesquerie) are more suited to campy Off Broadway musicals.

This is a perfectly pleasant, entertaining and often witty romp with engaging performances.

Once again, Hollywood makes the mistaken assumption that cribbing Shakespearean plots and dumping the poetry will somehow download the Bard's brilliance.

She's the Man, a screwball comedy that made me wish I were 13 again, because this is precisely the kind of movie I would have gone nuts for in the ninth grade.

Amanda Bynes...tackles the lead role of Viola/Sebastian with enough enthusiasm to wring laughs from the retread story.

A cross-dressing comedy that's all dressing can only, well, leave you cross.

She's the Man retains much of Twelfth Night's discombobulation and many of its names but is aimed, unlike the original, at the cherry-lip-gloss demographic.

You don't have to know Twelfth Night to have fun at She's the Man. But brushing up on your Shakespeare can be good for a few inside chuckles.

She's the Man, modeled on that gender-bending Shakespeare masterpiece, is harmless fun for the 12-year-olds who should make up the core audience.

I didn't for one second believe the plot of She's the Man,but I did believe for the entire movie that Amanda Bynes was lovable.

As you can imagine, sticking a girl dressed up as a boy into a dorm with hunky boys lusting for girls is the stuff of comic mix-ups, and in She's the Man, we have plenty.

A comedy that lacks both the verbal sophistication of its source and the sexual sophistication of its target audience.

While I liked She's the Man, I liked it better when it was called Just One of the Boys, a semi-forgotten 1985 farce.

Confusion runs amok. But it's all upbeat, oh-so-cute confusion.

She's the Man gathers up enough energy and likeable goodwill that it almost skirts past some extremely strained passages in which Bynes plays out being a boy.

No one under 12 need rush out to see She's the Man.

If music be the food of [teen] love, play on. Just so long as Amanda Bynes is the player.

More often than not it's the slapstick elements, predictably occasioned by gender confusion, that get the laughs.

As was proven with 10 Things I Hate about You, it is possible to re-imagine the Bard in a modern high school setting, but She's the Man doesn't do it well.

She's the Man fails to exploit the myriad comedic possibilities, settling instead for broad, unconvincing slapstick aimed at 12-year-olds and gags Shakespeare would have rejected as ancient.

As in Bynes' 2003 film What a Girl Wants, She's the Man wraps her up in a tidy romantic-comedy package with a generically non-threatening piece of Teen Beat eye candy.

There I sit, suffering total numbness of body and brain, no longer having to wonder what it might be like to be buried alive in gooey marshmallow.

There's a sweetness about it that wins you over.