The Duff (2015)

Oh my God, I'm old.

Is this it? Is this when I finally stop being interested in high school movies? I liked Superbad! Oh crap, that came out in 2007. Easy A was pretty good! Uh-oh, 2010. This may be the end.

I wanted to enjoy The Duff. I hoped it would be different from the trope of "high school misfit surprises everyone by being gorgeous when she takes off her glasses", I hoped it would remind me of my high school days, I hoped it could just make me laugh. It failed on almost all levels.

Bianca, Jess, and Casey are a trio of tight-knit friends. Jess & Casey are beautiful, talented, and popular. Bianca has her own strengths, but all in the "quirky weirdo" realm of old horror movies and thrift shop outfits. She embraces her uniqueness, but is still treated as less than her other friends. Things come to a head at a party when her neighbor/football star explains that she is a DUFF, Designated Ugly Fat Friend, only there to make her friends look even better by comparison.

Rather than take a stand and embrace her DUFFness, she completely caves and decides she needs to be popular. I get that we were all vulnerable in high school (well, most of us), so being told to our face that we were a scrub would be crushing, but after spending the whole beginning of the movie showing how happy Bianca was with her life, it was just a let-down to see her fall into another cliche.

There were a few laughs here and there, but the whole just got dragged down familiar characters, familiar jokes, familiar plot, just mostly boilerplate stuff. You have the football stud, the ice princess (updated to include YouTube stardom!), the dreamy wannabe rockstar, the faculty trying to be hip, the somewhat-cool mom who tries too hard to identify with her kid and their friends but ends up being endearing anyway. We even get the "what's on the inside is what matters, but I didn't realize you were beautiful inside until you were also attractive outside" happy ending.

Lots of people have takeng oft-told stories and updated them, bringing them into modern times, and some have worked. If the only addition to the base story is yelling "twitter! vine! tumblr! snapchat-meme-youtube hits-viral" all over the place, I can't understand why - oh god it really happened I'm too old for this sh*t.