Jessica Bendinger must have gone to high school with some nasty girls. The writer of Bring It On has moved to the director's chair for her latest film, Stick It, and has chosen gymnastics instead of cheerleading for the horrendously competitive and unfair sport. While Stick It has the sassy one-liners and inspirational moral that fans of Bendinger have come to expect, it also has a predictable story line, flat characters, and a theme that is shoved down the otherwise intelligent movie-goer's throat.

Stick It tells the story of teen punk-without-a-cause Haley Graham (played by Missy Peregrym in her first silver screen role), who gets arrested and must pay her debt to society by, of course, attending a gymnastics academy. There she meets the hatred of all those who remember years ago when Haley walked out during the world gymnastics competition, disqualifying team U.S.A. She also has to train with the cool but deceitful coach Burt Vickerman (played by the only name actor, Seabiscuit's Jeff Bridges), and their relationship seems destined to be forever sour due to Haley's refusal to play nice with the other girls.

The movie opens with a title sequence featuring graffiti names written throughout a computer-animated town. This sequence characterizes much of the film: visually interesting with a popular soundtrack, but in ways that have little, if anything, to do with the plot. For example, Haley never once holds a can of spray paint. The story itself then opens with a voice over by Haley, just in case someone in the audience might miss the point of the next few scenes: she is a rebel who will risk injury to impress people. We don't hear another voice over until about halfway through the film, making the first seem a bit out of place.

One of the biggest weaknesses of this film is that Bendinger can't seem to decide what the movie is about. It starts by showing us the story of Haley, rebelling until she finds a role model who's proud of her. Haley doesn't want to accept the rules of the gym, Burt wants her to, and various other girls hate her. Enter her philosophy of gymnastics: risk injury to impress people. After a while, Haley's story gets resolved, but there's still plenty of movie left. The film then becomes a story about rebelling against the gymnastics judges, and a commentary on how their technicalities are ruining the sport. While these are all linked thematically, it does leave you with the impression that Bendinger had a lot of ideas and tried to cram them all in. By the end, you are left remembering the final triumph over a minutia-focused sport, so you begin to question the point of the whole first half of the film.

But it wasn't all bad – there were some truly praiseworthy acting performances. Bridges excelled as the flawed but fatherly Burt, adding layers to his character that were absent in the rest. Perhaps some of the most entertaining moments in the film came from newcomer Nikki SooHoo as Wei Wei Yong, a young and shy member of Haley's team. One shot lingered on her face for 10 or so seconds while she kept the audience laughing at her reaction to some misleading news. And as you might guess from the trailer, she rocked out a hip hop beam routine to K7's "Come Baby Come." Peregrym's performance was overtaken by these others, though I wonder if its weakness was a result of her acting or of the shaky motivations of her flat character.  

If you're in the mood for absurdly extraneous visual effects, one-liners that could be said by just about anyone, a plot that leaves no surprises, and bigger ideas which get explicitly spelled out to you, then Stick It is the movie for you. To its credit, it exposes a world that few of us are used to and does raise some interesting questions about professional gymnastics. There are a few big laughs and a couple of pulled heart strings which make it worth watching, but this unfortunately requires you to sit through the rest of the movie.

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