Grating skating

Drew Barrymore tanks with
her directorial debut Whip It

ROLLER GIRLS: Whip It

by MATTHEW HAYS

Drew Barrymore has seen so much of the underbelly of Hollywood, it makes you salivate to consider how much fun her memoirs will be to read. There were drugs, sex, booze and rehab at a ludicrously early age—and, to steal a line from the Robert Evans bio, that’s just the first reel. Having seemingly seen it all, I had real hopes that Barrymore, in her directorial debut, would be able to wipe away all the crap that goes with Hollywood studio films and see her way clear to making something truly invigorating, original and transcendent even.

Wow, I’m more of an optimist than I thought. Because Whip It, the new feature that Barrymore helmed about a teenage girl’s dreams of becoming a roller derby star, is about as bad as movies get. It features Canuck Ellen Page as the working-class kid with heart who wants to skate but must keep it from her father and especially her overbearing mother (played by Marcia Gay Harden, who deserves much, much better than this). Page is trading on her Juno character as a bad girl (who’s really not that bad), trying hard to win at roller skating, juggle home life and her friends, romance a new boyfriend and kick the school bully’s ass. This is so cliché-soaked, it’s basically a how-not-to manual of screenwriting.

Worst of all is Barrymore’s penchant for montage sequences. I had hoped, also optimistically, that after Team America’s brilliantly astute skewering of such sequences, people might feel reluctant to resort to them. When apparently at a loss, Barrymore opts for the cheap device: slap a maudlin song on the soundtrack, cut to Page acting crazy with her friends, hanging with her boyfriend, practising her skating, and so on. You’d hope that, at the very least, the action sequences—with the skaters bashing each other as they compete—would offer some excitement, but they’re so poorly shot, they come up equally cold.

I had high hopes that Whip It might prove a real film about adolescence, one not just with teeth but bona fide fangs, like Welcome to the Dollhouse. Instead, this shoddily written, direly rendered movie should go straight to the trash heap. Not even worth a rental when you’re stoned out of your mind.

WHIP IT OPENS
THIS FRIDAY, OCT. 2