"A Cinderella Story" is yet another instance of Hollywood taking a classic fairy tale from the Middle Ages and doing it up in modern dress. This one is set in the "Valley Girl" world of snooty bitches and pimply-faced teens, where love blooms in internet chat rooms, and romantic encounters are reduced to an endless exchange of poorly spelled and ungrammatical text messages.
The story begins in the 1994 San Fernando Valley when Sam's deliriously happy childhood is shattered by the sudden death of her father in the Northridge earthquake of all things (I wish I were kidding about this, but I'm not), leaving her to suffer under the iron fists of a wicked stepmother and two equally repulsive stepsisters. (One wonders what Sam's lights-out time must have been, since the quake in the film occurs while her father is reading her a bedtime story - a bit odd considering that the actual shaker took place at 4:35 in the morning). The film quickly moves to the present day, where we encounter a teenaged Sam living a life of sheer, unadulterated drudgery, while still yearning for that fairy tale prince to ride into the scene and take her away from it all.
To more comfortably accommodate the contemporary setting, all the magical elements of the story have been effectively eliminated and only the romantic clichés remain. Thus, the fairy godmother has been converted into a sassy waitress who watches over Sam and provides her with the gown she needs at that crucial Cinderella moment; the ball has become a high school Halloween dance; the glass slipper has morphed into a left-behind cell phone (though little is actually ever done with that); and Prince Charming is no longer the heir to an entire kingdom but rather a hunky quarterback with dreams of going to Princeton (ha ha) against his father's expressed wishes.
Hilary Duff doesn't exactly embarrass herself in the role of Cinderella, but she is forced to struggle with a screenplay overflowing with annoying, over-the-top stereotypes and teen romance banalities. And the movie boasts a penultimate scene at the big championship football game that will have the girls in the audience sighing with satisfaction - and the boys groaning in pain.
With one preposterous scene after another, this lame and insipid, by-the-numbers concoction is an insult to thinking teens everywhere.
The story begins in the 1994 San Fernando Valley when Sam's deliriously happy childhood is shattered by the sudden death of her father in the Northridge earthquake of all things (I wish I were kidding about this, but I'm not), leaving her to suffer under the iron fists of a wicked stepmother and two equally repulsive stepsisters. (One wonders what Sam's lights-out time must have been, since the quake in the film occurs while her father is reading her a bedtime story - a bit odd considering that the actual shaker took place at 4:35 in the morning). The film quickly moves to the present day, where we encounter a teenaged Sam living a life of sheer, unadulterated drudgery, while still yearning for that fairy tale prince to ride into the scene and take her away from it all.
To more comfortably accommodate the contemporary setting, all the magical elements of the story have been effectively eliminated and only the romantic clichés remain. Thus, the fairy godmother has been converted into a sassy waitress who watches over Sam and provides her with the gown she needs at that crucial Cinderella moment; the ball has become a high school Halloween dance; the glass slipper has morphed into a left-behind cell phone (though little is actually ever done with that); and Prince Charming is no longer the heir to an entire kingdom but rather a hunky quarterback with dreams of going to Princeton (ha ha) against his father's expressed wishes.
Hilary Duff doesn't exactly embarrass herself in the role of Cinderella, but she is forced to struggle with a screenplay overflowing with annoying, over-the-top stereotypes and teen romance banalities. And the movie boasts a penultimate scene at the big championship football game that will have the girls in the audience sighing with satisfaction - and the boys groaning in pain.
With one preposterous scene after another, this lame and insipid, by-the-numbers concoction is an insult to thinking teens everywhere.