Sugar & Spice

On paper, a movie about a squad of bank-robbing cheerleaders sounds like a fun idea. It could be cross between Jawbreaker and Heathers, a whip-smart, scathing social satire, a black comedy with no mercy and no sacred cows, or even just a wild, slapstick concept. Instead, this 81 minute movie feels twice that and more thanks to a painfully unfunny script that fails in every possible way to be even tangentially associated with the concept of funny. The set-up is fine, again, on paper. The head cheerleader gets knocked up by the QB, they move in together and plan to have the baby, but life is expensive, so the head cheerleader and her besties decide the fastest way to financial freedom is bank robbery. This should work. There is a lot of snarky fun to be had with this set-up. The movie squanders all of it. Just about everybody gets one personality trait and rides it into the ground; Diane, the lead, is eternally positive. Lisa is jealous. Kansas (yes, that's her name) is abrasive. Cleo has a crush on Conan O'Brien. Hannah is religious. The movie plays off these vast gold mines of depth as if they're funny by virtue of existing. Kansas is so quick-tempered, she's ready to beat up everyone! Hannah brings up Jesus in every conversation! Cleo really, really wants to sleep with Conan O'Brien! Isn't that hilarious? No, it is not hilarious. Sugar & Spice understands how to be whimsical and light-hearted (which is a problem in and of itself, but let's put a pin in that), but it doesn't mean it knows how to deliver a joke. There are no set-ups and no punchlines anywhere. It expects the personality quirks and absurdity of cheerleader bank robbers (which doesn't happen for AN HOUR INTO THE MOVIE) to carry the entire weight of comedy. It also fails as a social satire because, well, satire requires pointed commentary, surgically precise insight, and a lampooning of social norms. Sugar & Spice probably can't even spell half the words in that last sentence, let alone define them or put the concepts to use. Teen pregnancy, young parenthood, the difficulties of young people trying to make it in the adult world, all of this is referenced insomuch as to say it exists, but that is the extent to which Sugar & Spice is interested in it. One might say I'm judging it based on something it isn't trying to be, and to that I push back. This movie fails at being a straight comedy, so the humor has to come from somewhere else. The inspirations for this movie are not just limited to Sugar & Spice's sleeves; they're worn like a HAZMAT suit, but they think that's enough, as if they're flashing a badge at a crime scene. It isn't enough. It isn't even a start. And it can't be a black comedy because of that tone I mentioned. Black comedies work because they're unapologetic and transgressive. Movies like Heathers, The War Of The Roses, and Election, all use the inherent ugliness of the situation or human beings themselves to mock something. They can be weird, they can be off-putting, they can absurdist in their presentation, but they are not, by definition, whimsical and silly. That's why we have movies like American Pie and Honor Society. They can be funny and fun and light-hearted without tonal dissonance. Sugar & Spice can't manage it, not for a moment. It is far too cheerful to carry the weight of the movie's nutso premise. I didn't laugh once during this. I didn't even smirk. I sat on the couch, waiting, feeling my patience ebb away as the movie failed to attempt to do anything but be cute and buoyant. I'd say this movie's premise writes a check the movie can't cash, but I don't know that an investment was made in the premise to begin with. It feels as though someone wrote "cheerleaders robbing a bank" on a napkin, thought that was enough of a premise, and worked backwards from there to put just enough effort into the script to make that scribble a reality, without once stopping to think if that was enough to hang a whole movie on. Answer, it wasn't.