He's All That (dir. Mark Waters, 2021) — Review

Like a chicken carcass broken down into bone meal, then pink goo, then finally a dino-shaped nugget, a remote derivative of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion has plopped onto our Netflix recommended lists. This Pygmalion features a TikTok star and Kourtney Kardashian — suck it, GBS!

Reassuringly, He’s All That is a forgettable moment in the churn of gender-flipped/’gritty’/diverse reboots of the past century’s celluloid staples. Hollywood has hitherto steered clear of the trickle-down classics of the ‘90s and ‘00s, from Clueless (Austen) to She’s The Man (Shakespeare), and rightly so: decades on, the high-school-reimagining schtick has all the cool of a recently divorced English teacher trying to hype up Silas Marner. Wisely, therefore, He’s All That avoids the fatally loserish move of actually making an effort.

The movie can’t really be described as bad, since it’s evident that no one, especially the production team, expected it to actually be anything; it simply exists. If there’s one thing the reboot has achieved with its mind-numbingly lethargic take on social media and influencer culture, it’s a perfect embodiment of the central mass around which the whole system centrifuges: ‘content’.

TikTok dancer Addison Rae heads a cast most memorable for their names, which suggest that they were lab-grown to star in Netflix original teen movies. Tanner Buchanan, Madison Pettis, and Peyton Meyer — selected by a casting director pulling vowel sounds from a hat — mosey along in Rae’s orbit, borne on the tide of the content churn and thus conveniently spared the trouble of acting. The plot, or lack thereof, helps massively in this regard.

Rae plays Padgett Sawyer, a high school influencer tasked with making Cameron (Buchanan), the least popular guy on campus (!), into prom king, after her boyfriend Jordan (Meyer) cheats on her. Why? Who knows. The logic of the original plot makes perfect sense — ‘powerful man shapes young woman to his wishes’ is a tale as old (or as contemporary) as time, and worked flawlessly in both Shaw’s musty Edwardian paws and the exuberantly misogynistic ‘90s. Gender-flipped, digitized, and buried under platitudes and product placements, it ceases to be a plot at all.

It’s difficult to harbor bad feelings towards the movie, since it’s near-impossible to harbour feelings towards it at all. This is almost certainly by intention. Like all good ‘content’, He’s All That peddles not entertainment but numbness, using two comforting triggers for the Netflix-native generation: disdain and nostalgia. The bland acting, the insipid plot, the cringeworthy Frito-pushing — all are calibrated for the Gen-Z viewer blasting themselves with content from three-odd screens at once, without fully engaging with any of them.

He’s All That doesn’t need to be a movie, or possess any such traditional qualities; it’s more of an incredibly dull safari through a corner of the current media landscape, where viewers can be diverted — but not too diverted — by a series of brief stimuli, from clunky dialogue to a comically large KFC bucket to, rarest and most novel of all, an actor or celebrity from the Olden Days. Like high school bigshots everywhere, it knows it’s not cool to apply yourself.