Stick It: Critic Reviews

A deliriously, defiantly unfocused headrush...

A spry teenage comedy that gets everything right, Stick It takes the usual batch of underdogs, dirt bags, mean girls and bimbos and sends them somersaulting through happy cliches and unexpected invention.

Stick It may be tough to stick out unless you're a girl between the ages of 11 and 16.

Is it a movie or an episode of Real Sports? It veers into fresh territory but not dramatically satisfying territory.

Stick It is a melodrama that doesn't know when to turn off the waterworks.

A spirited, dizzyingly athletic movie about female rites of passage within the bitchy, competitive world of Olympics training.

There are some great gymnastics stories out there. This isn't one of them.

Bendinger, who wrote for rock magazine Spin, has figured out a way to salute female competition and unity.

Stick It uses the story of a gymnast's comeback attempt as a backdrop for overwrought visual effects, music videos, sitcom dialogue and general pandering.

Where Bring It On found fans well outside its theoretical demographic, Stick It is unlikely to follow suit.

Subversively funny ...

In terms of eye candy, Stick It is a feast. Unfortunately, the film is a famine in just about every other regard.

Stick It isn't groundbreaking material, but at least it keeps its balance.

The use of the prim but rigorous world of women's gymnastics as a setting for teen rebellion is so strained it leaves the pic's ode to personal authenticity feeling as phony as a dubious decision by a competition judge.

Rarely is a sports movie so inept that it can't even make its central figure likable.

Writer-director Jessica Bendinger, an ex-model, veteran of Sex and the City and fun girl comedies, throws away more good lines than most teen comedies can muster.

There is a positive message in the film, often obscured by the bogus punk attitude.

Unfortunately, [Jessica] Bendinger's directorial debut is far more formulaic [than Bring It On].

On every other level, the film is thoroughly ordinary, with the only distinction being Bridges' typically unaffected and engaging performance.

Tween and teen girls will love it, though. And regardless of age (or gender), it does make you want to put down the Junior Mints and head to the gym.

The film strives for some type of a girl-empowerment message that equates trading one type of conformity for another with self-determination but muffs the dismount and stumbles on the landing. In other words, it fails to Stick It.

A message of competitive independence permeates debut director Jessica Bendinger's spunky movie about Haley Graham (Missy Peregrym) a headstrong gymnast-disguised-as-rebel who learns to embrace her talents by way of careful coaching from Jeff Bridges.

Like most sports movies, Stick It has a message: Unless they're equipped with loads of sass-back and a pile of band T-shirts that announce their hardcoreness, female gymnasts are really, really stupid.