From the director of Cinderella (1997) and She’s All That (1999), Robert Iscove, came the painfully awkward romantic comedy Boys & Girls (2000). Boys & Girls came out at the height of the youth oriented romantic comedy in the late nineties and early two-thousands that included American Pie (1999), Can’t Hardly Wait (1998), Ten Things I Hate About You (1999), the aforementioned She’s All That and a slew of less than memorable imitators. Boys & Girls is one of those unfortunate imitators.
On paper the premise of Boys & Girls is promising. The film follows Ryan (Freddie Prinze Jr.) and Jennifer (Claire Forlani) from ages twelve to twenty through a series of confrontational encounters that inevitable ends when they become friends and fall in love. This “down through the years” structure is lifted from When Harry Met Sally (1989) but, of course, starting and ending the journey much earlier in the characters’ lives.
Claire Forlani and Freddie Prinze Jr. have little chemistry which is further compounded by the terrible screenwriting. The characters talk a lot about what jokes are funny and which are not but none of these quips or puns ever lands. Similarly, the arcs of each character are motivated by such selfish reasons that it is consistently hard for one to root for them to get together. Not even the sad puppy eyes of Freddie Prinze Jr. possess enough charm to make this “will they, won’t they” adventure durable.
The secondary characters (best friends of the leads) are simply problematic. Jason Biggs as Hunter is a deluded, manipulative liar obsessed with getting laid while Amanda Detmer’s Amy seems to be experiencing a personal crisis of sexual orientation and depression. Ryan’s advice to Hunter is to be himself which unlocks a disturbing fascistic streak in the character. Jennifer’s relationship to Amy is one of enabling placation. At one point Any mentions suicide to which Jennifer merely inquires if she’s “okay” before going to look for Ryan. Alyson Hannigan, who plays Ryan’s high school sweetheart, is hardly in the movie at all.
Nothing in Boys & Girls is all that plausible, from the nightclub to Ryan’s engineering class. The one truthful moment in the entire film is the expression on Jason Biggs’ face when he hits a goon in the testicles with a pool stick. Biggs’ face is an expression of shock, horror and self-gratification all rolled into one. It’s a throw away scene that adds nothing to the film except another a brief hiatus from Freddie Prinze Jr. being a jerk.
Whether this is intentional or not I cannot say, but there is a queer coded montage of Biggs getting ready for a party that, for its single minute of the film’s runtime, is compelling. Biggs dresses like a cowboy, Hugh Hefner, and a variety of “playboy” stereotypes. These shots of Biggs in various costumes are interspersed with shots of images of handsome, hunky men he has cut from magazines and tapped to his mirror.
The fact that there is more to be said about Jason Biggs in Boys & Girls than there is about Freddie Prinze Jr. and Claire Forlani should be an indicator of the scope of this film’s failure. Boys & Girls got released as it is based solely on the popularity of its leading man and not the quality of the film itself. Boys & Girls went into production as part of the same deal at Miramax as She’s All That. Was the cost of making She’s All That worth inflicting Boys & Girls onto the world? Maybe.
