'He's All That': Hollow and unnecessary

Let Hollywood learn that taking a 20-year-old movie with mixed reviews and swapping the gender isn't an automatic formula for success. More often than not, it's a spell for a stinker.

Consider the example of "What Women Want." The Mel Gibson/Helen Hunt flick debuted in 2000 to less-than-stellar reviews with a 54% on Rotten Tomatoes. In 2019, "What Men Want" starring Taraji P. Henson and Tracy Morgan released to mixed reviews and a 44% on Rotten Tomatoes.

In 1999, Freddie Prinze Jr. and Rachael Leigh Cook starred in a high school rom-com called "She's All That." It didn't have the best reviews, and the reboot, "He's All That," is unlikely to fare much better.

The story follows a social media makeover star named Padgett Sawyer (Addison Rae) who goes to surprise her boyfriend with some baked goods, only to discover he was sleeping with another girl. To make matters worse, she was livestreaming the whole thing, and hundreds of thousands of her peers witnessed her throwing stuff at him and having an unflattering moment.

After dumping her boyfriend, Jordan (Peyton Meyer), Padgett regrets the turn of events, saying she transformed him from a teenager with bad skin and awful hair into the music video star he currently is. So one of her "friends" offers her a bet that she can't take another loser from her school and turn him into prom king. She accepts, and thus begins the descent into a shallow and exhausting 88 minutes of film.

The unfortunate soul Padgett's friends select for her to makeover is an outcast photographer named Cameron (Tanner Buchanan). For the first half of the movie, he's an agitating soul whose only personality traits are hating everything popular and acting like an intellectual snob. He thankfully ditches these inexplicable traits later.

"He's All That" is a dose of shallow Californians who like to party. At least a third of the film is Padgett and Cameron attending parties as he slowly loosens up. Rae brings a positive charisma to the film despite toying with a boy's emotions to win a bet. She can sing, act and dance. It's a shame she's wasted on such a hollow story.

When Cameron isn't scoffing his fellow cast members to death, he does get a legitimate laugh now and again.

The film leans heavily on social media (especially TikTok) as a gimmick because it has little else to say, and it's the most exhausting aspect of "He's All That." So much of the movie is spent streaming or watching streams that it feels like the audience should actually be watching TikTok instead of the movie.

"He's All That" does get some credit for including a few likable gay characters, but it also has an extremely problematic moment with Jordan trying to sexually assault Cameron's little sister, Brin (Isabella Crovetti), violating her consent. Not only does the moment add nothing to the film, but it's made worse by the fact Brin looks like she's 14, and Jordan looks 18 or 19. It was creepy and a terrible scene to include in the movie.

There are moments where "He's All That" doesn't quite know what to include in its trim running time, so it has an inexplicable martial arts battle between Cameron and Jordan. During the film's conclusion at the prom, there's a dance battle with great choreography. But how many proms have dance battles between two teams?

Halfway through the film, the girl, Alden (Madison Pettis), with whom Padgett made her bet suddenly becomes a bully and proceeds to do her worst impression of any character from "Mean Girls." It comes out of nowhere and, like so many other factors in "He's All That," adds little to the movie.

The film does have likable characters like Brin and the lesbian pair, Quinn (Myra Molloy) and Nisha (Annie Jacob). But they're swallowed up by a shell of a movie that didn't have anything new to say and needed social media gimmicks just to make its running time.

"He's All That" debuts on Netflix today, and with the wide library the streaming giant has, it's worth finding something else to watch.