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Stick It!
1.5 of 4 Stars
Rated: PG-13 for Mild Language and Subject Matter
Featuring: Missy Peregrym, Vanessa Lengies, Jeff Bridges, Nikki SooHoo,
Maddy Curley
Director: Jessica Bendinger
Producer: Daryn Okada
Distributor: Buena Vista Pictures
Reviewed by: Michael Karounos
Stick It is a gymnastics movie in which a rebellious former gymnast gets in
trouble with the law, is sentenced to do her time at a hard-core gym, and
redeems herself after costing her team the gold medal at the World
Championships two years before.
The movie is written and directed by Jessica Bendinger who also wrote Bring
It On and similarly hip-hops a white cultural milieu in Stick It. The movie opens
with Haley Graham (Missy Peregrym) dressed boy-like in an ominous hoody
doing outrageous BMX stunts that have her fleeing from the police with whom,
she says, she has an “ongoing flirtation.” As she runs away to a rap-like
soundtrack, she strips off the hood, helmet, and gloves, revealing that what
lies beneath the image of rebellion is a pretty girl with pigtails.
This is the governing metaphor of the movie: beneath every white girl is a
rebel who is yearning to talk Truth to Authority, whether it be police, coaches,
parents, or judges. Every surface in her room—the dresser, the desk, the
posters, etc.—is tagged with gang-like graffiti to show her rejection of her
vanilla suburban culture.
Haley is sent to do her time at a cavernous gym where only eight other
gymnasts are training. Burt Vickerman (Jeff Bridges), is supposedly a
tyrannical coach with a reputation for breaking his athletes, but Jeff Bridges
can’t convincingly portray that type of coach. Rather, he has prostituted his
ideals and is interested only in milking rich parents of their money. Haley’s
idealism transforms him by film’s end and shows him to have the proverbial
heart of gold. The mischaracterization of Bridge’s character as a tough guy
rather than a greedy idolator is confusing and seems to reflect a tension
between the script as written and Bridge’s interpretation, which is truer to his
personality.
The film’s style consists of MTV-like editing and a soundtrack which would be
tiresome to anyone under 18 were it not for the one truly excellent aspect of
the movie—the gymnasts. I saw Stick It with a former top gymnast who owns
one of the largest gyms in the country. When I asked him what was the best
part of the movie he echoed Maddy Curley’s (Mina Hoyt in the movie)
interview comment that it accurately reflected how hard gymnasts’ work.
That may be true to an experienced eye, but what a layperson sees in the
movie is not how hard gymnasts work, but how hard they fall. Everyone has
seen a single gymnast hit the mat hard in televised competitions, but to see a
well-edited series of violent slams truly conveys how hard and how fast
gymnasts are traveling when they hit something. It becomes apparent that
only a human as compactly muscled and trained as a gymnast can survive
such repeated poundings, and it gives the average viewer a new-found
appreciation for the sport as requiring not just an extraordinary skill set, but a
mental and physical toughness that is masked by the little girl appearances of
the athletes.
Ultimately, the movie should have been about the gymnasts and the rewards
of such brutal training, but writer/director Jessica Bendinger was so enamored
with her agenda to undermine the authority of the white mothers and white
judges with stereoptypical black music and attitude, that she disappoints
audience expectations at the end of the movie by not allowing the gymnasts
to show their stuff. Instead, she reduces these superb athletes to preening
pout queens who awkwardly strut through routines that dancers can do
better. This leaves the audience with a non-climax in which non-dancers
perform in a non-meet. The final sequence reveals nothing so much as that
Bendinger’s ego is bigger than the movie and bigger than gymnastics itself.
Had Bendinger been content to do a pure gymnastics film, without the
amateurish swearing and posturing that infantilized rather than complimented
these remarkable young women, it could have been a memorable movie for
its genre. But as seems so often the case with movies these days, politics
creeps in and instead we get a contrived ending in which the most
individualistic athletes in the world, who spent many years training six hours a
day, unionize and go on strike. It’s an absurd ending to an absurd premise
between which we get some well-shot sequences of top-notch athletes.
Maddy Curley’s performance was, as one would expect of an excellent
athlete, pitch-perfect, and her bright-eyed portrayal of an intense gymnast
was a welcome relief from watching Missy Peregrym being forced to strike the
same note of rebelliousness throughout the movie. Peregrym does what she
can with the role and delivers several lines with genuine comedic timing, but
for too much of the movie she is required to be glum and sullen.
The movie has numerous instances of swearing, but the most egregious
aspect of it is the tiresome portrayal of all the mothers as shrill, superficial
has-been beauties who care about nothing so much as their own enhanced
busts and egos. One such mother would have been enough, but every
mother was portrayed that way. Since the movie doesn’t show a single
positive relationship with a mother and a daughter, its message in that regard
is that the gang is the family and the family is the gang. Reject authority;
break rules; do what you want, because the only one who understands you is
other teenagers. It’s a childish message, it doesn’t do the athletes justice, and
it completely undermines the biblical injunction to “Honor your father and
mother.” Given how much mothers do in this world, is this really the message
we want to give our teenage daughters and sons?
The movie’s PG-13 rating is well-earned and families with children below that
age who are sensitive to bad language and negative family stereotyping
should avoid it. Those who are interested in a revealing look at how hard
gymnasts train (and fall) might consider seeing it as long as they don’t expect
a gymnastics competition at the end.
Violence: Minor / Profanity: Moderate / Sex/Nudity: None
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