The "Bring It On" Franchise

[StevePulaski]

Bring It On (2000)
Directed by: Peyton Reed

Gabrielle Union, Kirsten Dunst, and Eliza Dushku in Bring It On.

Rating: ★★½

Bring It On is set in a San Diego high school where the football team has been hot garbage for years while the cheerleading squad is the real attraction. Rancho Carnie High School's cheer-squad has won five consecutive national championships, and is gunning for their sixth under new captain Torrance Shipman (Kirsten Dunst), a young woman who says "cheer is my whole life" without a trace of irony. She's dealt a crummy hand from the jump when a team-member breaks her leg, forcing her and the girls to hold tryouts. The standout is Missy (Eliza Dushku), a gymnast who settles for cheerleading seeing as the school doesn't have a gymnastics program. Her aversion to the cultist tendencies of cheerleading is evident in her tryout, but her moves are undeniably impressive.

It's Missy who drops a bomb on Torrance shortly after making the team and seeing their routine at practice: their cheers have been stolen from the mostly black East Compton High School's cheer-squad, led by Isis (Gabrielle Union). Now, pressed for time, Rancho Carnie is looking at a total rebuild of their cheers, prompting Torrance to seek out professional dancers and other outlets for inspiration with nationals looming. Also on her mind is Cliff (Jesse Bradford), Missy's Brit-pop loving brother, who develops a crush on Torrance despite being mystified by how she can be so consumed by cheerleading.

Director Peyton Reed — who made his transition from TV to features with Bring It On and would later go on to direct both Ant-Man and its sequel in the mid 2010s — and Sex and the City writer Jessica Bendinger make an attempt to bring a self-aware edge to the material, but fail to have it define the picture. Bring It On wants to laugh at how seriously Torrance and her fellow cheerleaders take the competition with moments like Torrance proclaiming, "My entire cheerleading career has been a lie!" once discovering her routines were stolen. But unlike, say, Alexander Payne's Election, by not committing to this snarkier tone that shows the degree of cattiness that inevitably occurs in competitive high school teams, it fails to bring the humorous edge to the story it's do desperately craving.

Instead, Reed turns the should-be R-rated material into a sitcom-esque effort that coasts on the charisma of the cast as opposed to the writing, which only goes so far. That being said, it goes the distance when you have Kirsten Dunst in her early days, boasting an incandescent smile, and Eliza Dushku, bringing a confident energy, although her transformation from a too-cool-for-this outcast to a peppy cheerleader happens a bit too fast to be believable. As impressive as the choreography tends to be, it does build to a flaccid finale where the lack of urgency and suspense in this sports movie catch up to it.

Bring It On is caught in a strange crevasse between satire and admiration of the catty cheerleader stereotype. It doesn't commit to being a biting commentary on the combative world of cheerleading nor the underlying "cheerocracy" politics that come into play for Torrance to company, but it does dazzle us with fluffy, mostly inoffensive comedy. Alas, we turn our brains off when we could've turned them on.

Starring: Kirsten Dunst, Eliza Dushku, Jesse Bradford, and Gabrielle Union. Directed by: Peyton Reed.

[StevePulaski]

Bring It On Again (2004)
Directed by: Damon Santostefano

Rating: ★

There's certainly a thinkpiece to be written regarding the onslaught of direct-to-video sequels to unexpected box office smashes, but I haven't the time nor patience to wade through the haystack to find the few-and-far-between needles. Sure, some might be better than average (Hostel: Part III) and others marginally palatable if you're at that much of a loss for things to watch (American Pie Presents: Band Camp). Yet the bulk of lame, tangentially related (at best) flicks hamfisting previously unsold screenplays into the framework of a pre-existing property is a market that remains ceaseless despite most of these offerings now being regulated to the "recommended for you" section on Netflix.

Some franchises, such as BloodRayne, Jarhead, and The Land Before Time, don't know when to stop. One of those series is Bring It On, and Bring It On Again — the first of several sequels — does all it can to capsize the rickety yet formidable foundation on which its predecessor was erected. Comprised of quippy, practically PG-dialog not remotely akin to the way real students speak and an excruciatingly uninteresting storyline of a group of ragtag collegiate rejects looking to dethrone a multi-national champion cheersquad, the film reveals itself to have nothing compelling to say or do within the first 15 minutes.

With the only connection to the original 2000 Kirsten Dunst/Eliza Dushku-comedy being its inclusion of a blooper-reel and musical montage over the closing credits, the film revolves around Whittier (Anne Judson-Yager), who begins her college journey at the fictional California State College. She has aspirations to join the cheerleading team with her friend Monica (Faune Chambers), and both succeed after wowing head cheerleader Tina (Bree Turner). With the college dean in her ear imploring her to make Whittier the next head cheerleader, Tina grinds her squad to the bone and puts enough undue pressure on Whittier and Monica that they quit cheerleading all together. Plagued by a feeling of listlessness, the two gals commit to starting their own cheerleading squad featuring a bunch of passionate thespians and other on-campus rejects. They become known as the "Renegades," and get the OK from the dean to compete against the more established squad for a shot at the national competition.

Like its predecessor, Bring It On Again wouldn't be complete without a love interest for the protagonist, which is where Derek (Richard Lee Jackson), a college radio DJ, comes into play. Jackson's role is especially thankless due to the fact that California State College is essentially run by jocks, basketball stars, and cheerleaders. At one point, Tina informs Whittier that radio DJs on a college campus are only one notch above cafeteria workers in terms of popularity. They're even beneath "film toads" and school journalists, and neither class ranks much higher on the list. I wouldn't have fared well at this college.

The conceit of Bring It On Again is drawn in broadstrokes so much so that it's tough to believe a trio of writers (two of them the Gunn brothers who would later go on to write Brightburn, a fascinating amalgam of a horror film and a superhero origins story) collaborated to produce something so hopelessly generic. Here's a taste of the dialog that makes up this sequel:

"Hey, Smart Guy! Why don't you say something smart, Smart Guy?"
"Congratulations, my little pumpkins. You have now joined the best of the best of the best. From here on out, you must be the bomb diggity."
“Sweetie, no double earrings. You're a state cheerleader, not a state hooker!”

Another character remarks how "three of the greatest presidents" — George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, and Dwight Eisenhower — were all cheerleaders. Certainly no bias in such an asinine statement that I'm sure, even in the hotbed, staunchly partisan political climate in which we presently are, has never been uttered with a shred of sincerity.

Furthermore, after some half-hearted research, I've concluded we, too, can blame Bring It On Again for people using the cringe-inducing phrase "bomb diggity" throughout the mid-to-late aughts.

Even the cheer choreography feels hopelessly uninspired. With how meek and muted the satirical angle was in Bring It On, it at least occasionally dazzled with impressive cheers coordinated with energetic pop hits. Bring It On Again isn't simply lifeless by comparison, it's inert on its own with basic flips, splits, and tumbles that render the whole production ungainly in its cheapness. In a strange way, it makes you rethink other similar PG-13 comedies (IE: Fired Up, I Love You, Beth Cooper) that would follow and wonder if they were that bad. Truth be told, they were, but nowhere near as bad as Bring It On Again.

Starring: Anne Judson-Yager, Faune Chambers, Bree Turner, Richard Lee Jackson, and Kevin Cooney. Directed by: Damon Santostefano.

[StevePulaski]

Bring It On: All or Nothing (2006)
Directed by: Steve Rash

Hayden Panettiere in Bring It On: All or Nothing.

Rating: ★★★

There's something pleasantly ironic, even humorous, about a movie that kicks off with a dream sequence of cheerleaders chastising their head-cheerleader for her allegedly "fake tits" and promiscuity only for it to be followed by an intrusive studio logo that reads "Universal Studios Family Production."

Bring It On: All or Nothing feels like the mid-2000s time-capsule I didn't know I wanted. From its characters speaking in "IM chat," a soundtrack populated by Rihanna and Weezer, and the use of now fossilized Nokia technology, the third installment of the cheerleader-centric franchise might even be better than the original film from 2000. It strikes a better balance of being a light-hearted look at the cattiness that runs amok in cheer-circles while addressing socioeconomic perceptions about those on the greener side of the grass and those looking to forge their own path by embracing their status. Maybe it's a surface-level examination of the latter, but the original Bring It On's resistance to pursue a more satirical angle for the material rendered a comedy caught in an unforgiving place known as "the middle-ground."

All or Nothing at least has the gall to avoid regurgitating the formula, as seen in the abysmal Bring It On Again, and creates an unlikely, memorable sequel.

Hayden Panettiere headlines as Britney Allen, the peppy, positive captain of her high school cheerleading team. She's got it all: an affluent neighborhood, the quarterback boyfriend, and her dream role on a team that follows her commands. Her life is shattered, however, when her father gets a new job in the urban Crenshaw Heights, meaning Britney must transfer to the predominately black high school in town. It's an uphill battle trying to get back into cheerleading for two reasons. For one, the captain is Camille (Solange Knowles-Smith), who has no tolerance for a blonde Barbie infiltrating her squad, and two, the loyalty of her old cheerleader friends who would bill her as a "cheer whore" if she were to join another team. Camille faces pressure from her closest friends (Francia Almendarez and Giovonnie Samuels, who is a riot), in turn prompting her to add Britney to the team just in time to compete in a televised competition hosted by pop singer Rihanna.

Where Bring It On Again found it effective to copy and paste the formula of its predecessor, All or Nothing posits a dichotomous look at Britney's old school versus her new one. On her first day of class, she's mystified by the presence of metal detectors at the school's entrance. "What is this, LAX?," she barks at the guards. She later can't comprehend how and why she is expected to take notes in class when the teacher can email them to her just as effectively. She's a privileged "powderpuff" with no conception of the outside world, and screenwriter Alyson Fouse has no problem making her the butt of the joke for good reason.

For there being no marquee stars — outside of era-specific inclusions of Panettiere and Knowles (best known as Beyoncé's sister) — the cast has amiable chemistry with each other. Beyond Samuels, who is well-utilized comic relief, there's Gus Carr, who serves as a voice of reason for Britney and the obligatory love interest, Marcy Rylan, who clearly enjoys the queen bitch role as the vindictive successor to Britney when she transfers, and Jessica Fife whose brazen vapidness is, too, utilized conservatively enough to be a welcomed diversion as opposed to a one-note joke. A sequel this belated shouldn't be so tethered to a dynamic cast, but that's the mindset one inevitably has after enduring many of these direct-to-video sequels.

Even the cheer sequences, which were lacking immensely in Bring It On Again, are lively and different. During her first days at Crenshaw Heights, Britney is introduced to the aggressive, impromptu dance-style of "krumping." After wowing the cheerleaders with her moves, the squad agrees to incorporate some of them into their routines, initially to the chagrin of Camille. This adds another layer of spontaneity to the cheers, and because of it, the aforementioned competition is dense enough that it justifiably takes up the final 25 minutes. The fact it gives Britney a shot at both redemption and affirmed compassion is an added bonus.

Look, Bring It On: All or Nothing is still several paces from a great film. Some of its dialog is still eye-roll-inducing, and thankfully, the "IM chat" isn't a lingering inclusion, for its just as ridiculous to say things like "IDTS" and "TTYL" aloud as it was in 2006. While it doesn't leave me much more optimistic for the subsequent installments, the fact that this franchise has left us with one uniformly solid film warms the cockles of my heart.

Starring: Hayden Panettiere, Solange Knowles-Smith, Gus Carr, Giovonnie Samuels, Francia Almendarez, Marcy Rylan, and Jessica Fife. Directed by: Steve Rash.

[StevePulaski]

Bring It On: In It to Win It (2007)
Directed by: Steve Rash

Rating: ★½

Would it kill one of these copious Bring It On sequels to have a tangential connection with their predecessors? This is a question I've pondered since seeing the marginally passable Bring It On: All or Nothing. I'm not asking for a Kirsten Dunst cameo; maybe a passing reference to Camille's infectious "shabooya role-call" chant. Perhaps we can return to Rancho Carne High School where a new crop of cheerleaders want to inject a bit of life into the cheerleading team in order to do right by the legacy of Torrance and Missy. I've come to discover that these Bring It On sequels have nary in common with the previous films outside of the usual song-and-dance credit sequence. You'd think at a certain point one of these screenwriters would at least shoot for the moon — relatively speaking, of course.

Bring It On: In It to Win It is another installment of the series that doesn't have a brain in its head nor a pep in its step. Its ensemble is comprised of flyweight bubble-brained characters with the sole dichotomy being they're either blonde lollipops or immaculately chiseled meatheads. I'm sure every performer in the film is a fine person in real-life, but given so much of the attention is on their beauty and moves, it's possible you could watch this sequel on mute and not miss a beat. It would at least save you from dismal dialog such as "I Myspaced it all out of my system."

The shred of ambition the film harbors is attempting to hamfist a West Side Story template into this laughably conceived universe, as if the target demographic for these throwaway, factory-made productions is even at all familiar with the 1957 Broadway play or 1960 musical. It revolves around Carson (Ashley Benson), the senior captain of her high school cheer-squad attempting to lead the West Coast Sharks to a victory at the Cheer Camp Nationals. Their rivals are the East High Jets, led by the snotty Brooke (Cassandra Scerbo) and a band of even bigger narcissists. Their tempers flare more than once as everyone gets increasingly combative and protective over the coveted Spirit Stick. The stick is a cheer-squad's good luck charm that must never be out of a person's sight and never touch the ground. When tensions boil over and result in multiple injuries, it forces the Sharks and the Jets to join forces and become "the Shets" (yet, the Shets) in order to remain in competition and have a shot at a national title.

While not the flagrantly uninspired snore that was Bring It On Again, In It to Win It fails to spice up the formula. It lacks outlying ideas similar to the light-hearted yet dynamic themes of its predecessor. Its cheer choreography consists of a lot of movement, but by now, it's beginning to feel stale. The routines look the same, and there's no added elements ala krumping in order to deviate from the norm. Looking back at the original film and All or Nothing — easily the strongest works in an increasingly polluted franchise — I'm beginning to realize what made the competitions so engaging was the drama and characters surrounding them. When you have the generic, sorority-sister-in-the-making protagonist and her hopelessly uncharismatic love interest anchoring an already substandard production without much special outside of ancillary callbacks to a pre-existing property, you're set up for an 87 minute affair that sometimes feels twice as long.

The film was directed by Steve Rash, who also directed All or Nothing, presumably back-to-back seeing as the films came out within 16 months of one another. Rash's ability to be serviceable in illustrating large-scale competitions with several moving performers remains uninhibited. The franchise's commitment to flimsy narratives and a lack of self-awareness remains in-tact, sadly so.

Starring: Ashley Benson, Cassandra Scerbo, Anniese Taylor Dendy, Michael Copon, Jennifer Tisdale, and Ashley Tisdale. Directed by: Steve Rash.

[StevePulaski]

Bring It On: Fight to the Finish (2009)
Directed by: Bille Woodruff

The East L.A. Rough Riders cheer-squad, anchored by Christian Milian's Lina, in the fifth entry in the Bring It On series.

Rating: ★★

Just when you thought Bring It On: All or Nothing did its part to help end racism, Bring It On: Fight to the Finish revives it with some truly terrible dialog. At one point, a character says "I don't speak Taco Bell menu," and the word "ghetto" is tossed around as if to emphasize the late aughts in a hyper-specific fashion. To waste your energy on being appalled by the fifth installment of the ongoing series is unwise 11 years later. It'd be smarter to do what the rest of us have ostensibly done: move along and try not to acknowledge its existence.

Bring It On: Fight to the Finish doesn't reach the low lows of Bring It On Again, nor are its characters uniformly contemptible as was the case in Bring It On: In It to Win It, although that would be its closest comp. Its cast is spunkier with more energy as an ensemble and during the cheer scenes, but the longest installment of the series thus far (103 minutes with credits) feels every bit of its length as it plods forward without much inspiration. By this point, it's familiar conflicts and cattiness with little to distract you from asking yourself, "why am I watching this?"

Lina Cruz (Christina Milian) is our protagonist this time around in a sequel that, yet again, outside of an opening dream sequence and closing credits set to a cheaply made music video, has no connection to is predecessors. Lina was born and raised in East Los Angeles, but her hopes of winning the upcoming Spirit Championships as captain of her high school squad are crushed when her mother shacks up with a wealthy beau and the family relocates to Malibu. There, Lina is an outcast, and back home, she is displaced on the team by her friends (Vanessa Born, Gabrielle Dennis) who will inevitably use most of her routines in the championship competition.

Surprising to no one except maybe Lina, the Malibu Vista High School Sea Lions cheerleading team is pathetic, yet she still harbors the belief she can rebuild the squad and compete in the Spirit Championships. One major roadblock is Avery (Rachele Brooke Smith), a cookie-cutter Queen Bitch who serves as captain of the rival Jaguars. Avery's brother, Evan (Cody Longo), takes a liking to Lina too, which only furthers Avery's hatred for the latest addition to the Sea Lions. During her quick ascension, Lina's hustle and demands grate on the team's spirit and she runs the risk of instilling a mutiny against herself as she struggles to find her identity in a brand new school.

There's nothing about the plot of Fight to the Finish that couldn't have inspired a good movie, or even a serviceable one. The problem at hand is the one that lingers in most of the Bring It On movies: they're hopelessly generic. They're filled with characters with loud personalities that function better as archetypes than relatable people. The plots take the bare basics of high school teen formulas and hamfist them to include cheerleading sequences that, by this point, if not already familiarly choreographed, are a muchness. Milian is a fine screen presence, who shows some poise during more climactic sequences, such as when it's looking as if her efforts to remake the Sea Lions are all for naught, but she's not given a strong enough screenplay that reveal any depth of her abilities.

The more I ponder, the more I believe the reason Bring It On: Fight to the Finish feels more offensive than the previous installments is it leaves me with desperately little to discuss. Bring It On Again was a lazy retread of formula that might as well be the poster-child for most direct-to-video sequels to surprise successes. In It to Win It used West Side Story as a template, and although it failed miserably, it showed a shrivel of ambition in that department. When your film has a line as ugly as the aforementioned one, you should at least have something worthy to discuss. That is ultimately where Fight to the Finish falls short.

Starring: Christina Milian, Rachele Brooke Smith, Cody Longo, Laura Cerón, Vanessa Born, and Gabrielle Dennis. Directed by: Bille Woodruff.

[StevePulaski]

Bring It On: Worldwide #Cheersmack (2017)
Directed by: Robert Adetuyi

The Rebels in the sixth installment of the Bring It On franchise.

Rating: ★

The sixth installment of the long-running Bring It On franchise curiously opts to include a hashtag in its title, which just on the basis of muchness alone is never a good sign. It comes off like a form of pandering, quite honestly; an attempt to engage a social media savvy generation by using recognizable internet conventions. But there's no fooling the film's target audience that Bring It On: Worldwide #Cheersmack is a lazy retread of formula. A sequel so dour and juvenile it only rivals Bring It On Again for the most inexcusable entry in a perpetually below-average series.

This time around, our lead character is Destiny (Cristine Prosperi), who has led the Rebels cheerleading squad to monstrous heights, both collectively and personally. She might be the only cheerleader in the world that's amassed a million followers on Instagram. Just when her and her squad are about to win yet another competition, their routine is interrupted when the jumbotron above displays a video of masked, black-clad dancers known as "The Truth" who roast the Rebels for being phony and unfit to hoist the championship trophy. That's right; they've been "#cheersmacked" by the Anonymous-esque group in front of the "world."

When the Rebels' popularity subsequently nosedives and they are left picking up the pieces of their reputation, Destiny has few options besides working with her closest ally Willow (Gia Lodge-O'Meally) in recruiting a trio of street-dancers. This will predictably cause a warring faction amongst the cheerleaders, but after all, Destiny's image is on the line. She turns to her online "Cheer Goddess" (Vivica A. Fox) in times of stress all while trying to structure a new routine to blow away The Truth and #cheersmack them back.

Having watched and reviewed the previous installments of the Bring It On franchise, I haven't felt quite as stupid relaying the details of a plot in quite sometime. Bring It On: Worldwide #Cheersmack is not only frivolous in nature, but frivolous in conflict and execution. It's a hackneyed attempt to be appealing towards the youngest generation without a clue in how to humanize them as people. The cast of characters may as well be holograms as opposed to living, breathing individuals capable of stringing multiple cogent sentences together.

Worse than all of the sequels that came before it, Worldwide #Cheersmack has no connection to the series in the slightest. It doesn't even begin with a hokey dream sequence that has the damsel protagonist in distress before waking up in relief realizing she didn't make a fool of herself nor her cute outfit. It too might go without saying that the Rebels can't hold a candle in terms of being a compelling bunch when compared to The Truth. Their thief-in-the-night-style choreographed dancing and prowess with hacking make them perhaps the most entertaining villains in any Bring It On movie yet. However, their motives are underdeveloped, their process left a mystery, and their significance in the long run — fleeting at best.

The flurry of on-screen tweets, the utterly desperate attempts to engage millennials by way of fictional slang ala "cheer-diculous" and "cheer-miliated," and dismal lack of meaningful character development all work against Bring It On: Worldwide #Cheersmack, a film that, judging by its title, was ultimately doomed from the start. Here's hoping the lengthy hiatus we got between this film and Fight to the Finish (released eight years prior) not only holds up but continues to break franchise records until further notice.

NOTE: Bring It On: Worldwide #Cheersmack is presently streaming on Netflix.

Starring: Cristine Prosperi, Gia Lodge-O'Meally, Jordan Rodrigues, Stephan Benson, and Vivica A. Fox. Directed by: Robert Adetuyi.