Movie Review: "Easy A"

Seen on: August 28, 2010

The players: Director: Will Gluck, Writer: Bert V. Royal, Cast: Emma Stone, Patricia Clarkson, Amanda Bynes, Penn Badgley, Dan Byrd, Alyson Michalka

Facts of interest: Will Gluck also helmed "Fired Up!"

The plot: Emma Stone plays a teenager spreading a lie about losing her virginity. Next thing you know, she's the center of attention at her high school...

Our thoughts: I’ll have to give “Easy A” a C. No, I didn’t exactly hate Will Gluck’s new comedy about a high-school chick spreading a bunch of lies, but the film simply failed to live up to my expectations. It’s definitely a step up from Gluck’s previous disaster “Fired Up!,” but when it comes to ideal comic timing, he’s not quite there yet. He’s close for sure, but this latest effort misses the mark a tad too often.

Emma Stone plays Olive, an energetic teenager who quickly becomes the center of attention at her small-town school after a little lie about losing her virginity spreads like a wildfire. At first, Olive doesn’t exactly appreciate everybody staring her down like she’s the school’s top hooker, but when she realizes that lying may make her life a tad easier, she turns to the rumor mill to boost her social status.

More specifically, Olive gets paid by male losers who want her to walk around and confirm she slept with them, even though she never actually touched any of them. This proves to be quite the lucrative business for her, at least until the Christian kids at school start to terrorize her and the whole lying thing threatens to spin out of control and ruin her life for good. Believe it or not, but Olive eventually learns that lying sucks.

“Easy A” sells itself as a modern retelling of “The Scarlet Letter,” and as such, I guess the movie more or less succeeds. Olive is reading the book in class and kind of sees her life paralleling Hester Prynne’s, which prompts her to embroider a red A on her clothes. Olive is proud of wearing it at first, but once she realizes that people really hate her and her actions is starting to ruin lives, she’s in for a big wake-up call.

The road to that point isn’t as funny as it seems. The filmmakers behind “Easy A” attempt to make a hilarious movie by having their characters deliver cool, edgy lines of dialogue, but sadly enough, the comic timing mostly fails. The film provides a few opportunities for a handful of quick laughs, but other than that, the jokes don’t work as well as they should. Even the plot doesn’t exactly qualify as compelling.

Olive is a fairly well developed character, but her relationships with others in the film are rushed and oversimplified. One good example is Amanda Bynes’ Christian advocate Marianne, who transforms from Olive’s greatest enemy to her best buddy in a matter of seconds. Implausible twists of events like this one are scattered all over the film, and if you care for a story with brains, you won’t be please to come across them.

Emma Stone does a reasonably solid job as the lead here, and there’s no doubt she’s got a strong future ahead of her. She looks the part and come across as natural most of the time, and she also happens to be the only one to inject this thing with energy. Co-starring as Olive’s free-spirited parents are Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson, and although they seem all awesome at first, they bring little to nothing of true value to the story.

Freaky quote: "A is for Awesome." - Emma Stone

The final word: No, “Easy A” does not deserve an F, but the film has a less depth that you may think at first. The edgy dialogue only works to a certain extent, and as the film progresses, the story gets messier and messier. I wasn’t bored watching this film because Stone brings along a strong presence that’s hard to ignore, but if it weren’t for her, this thing would get very far. This could’ve been great, but it’s only so-so.

Article by Franck Tabouring