Ever since the show Life As We Know It, the very, very short-lived quasi-sequel to Freaks and Geeks, I’ve wondered what would happen to Missy Peregrym. She was the best thing about the show, the perfect American girl, athletic and funny, endearing yet strong.

 

 

She appeared briefly in a few series episodes and had a very small part in Catwoman, but she seemed destined for greater things. On the other hand, she is only 24 with plenty of time to build up a career. On the third hand time moves too damn fast and the next thing you know she’ll be 32 and in trouble.

On the surface, then, Stick It seemed like a good choice for her. A lead role in a youth oriented movie that highlighted both her healthy looks and her comedy skills. A healthy cast. A “sports” story that is, consequently, easy to plot and make jokes for (the credited writer is Bring It On scripter Jessica Bendinger, here also making her debut as a director). But unfortunately, the film is kind of weirdly uneven, like a kid’s balloon twisted in strange ways, big in the wrong places and small in the wrong places.

Stick It is set in the world of teen girl’s gymnastics, and in her voice over narration, Haley Graham (Peregrym), has some amusingly acerbic things to say about the sport and the judging. The twist of the movie is that competing gymnasts get together at the concluding tournament to act in solidarity, deliberately scratching so as to elevate the one person they have collectively determined is the best in one of the four events.

This clever plot point is obscured by too much back story about Haley. She starts out as an extreme biker in her Texas home town (the movie doesn’t feel like Texas, by the way), who is arrested for vandalism. Once a promising gymnast, she is remanded by the judge to a gymnastics school the next big town over, run by Burt Vickerman (Jeff Bridges, who bases his acting process on the nonstop gum chewing). Haley lives with her dad (Jon Gries), and is alienated from her mother. In fact she is alienated from everyone (except her two essentially sexless bike friends, one of whom appears to be gay), recalcitrant, sullen, complainy, and smart-mouthed. And she remains so for what seems like the first hour of this 103 minute movie. The mystery is why? Why is she so dissatisfied with gymnastics and why does she hate everyone? And why did she walk about from competition in “the Worlds” just seconds before going on the floor? When we eventually learn, we still don’t know. The plot point is so obscure and concerns people we have hardly met (a different gymnastics coach who seduced her mother and broke up her family), that it hardly explains anything, and her confession of this trauma to Vickerman seems hardly to have the weight it needs to change her personality in time for the final competition. It was good of the film to try to deviate from the conventions of the sports triumph genre, especially in its various moments of Canadian Film Board visual playfulness.

 

 

Stick It arrives in a good widescreen transfer (1.85:1, enhanced), with DD 5.1, French DD 2.0 Stereo, Spanish DD 2.0 Stereo, plus closed captioning, and subtitles in English, Spanish, and French.

There are plenty of supplements. There are two commentaries, the first with director Bendinger and actors Peregrym and Vanessa Lengies, the second with Bendinger, DP Daryn Okada and editor Troy Takaki. The first is fun; the second is technical, with lots of explanations of motivations that make the movie make sense in retrospect; three and a half minutes of “Buttaharas: Outrageous Bloopers and Outtakes”; thirteen minutes of deleted scenes with optional cast or crew commentaries, which explain, among other things, scenes written to explore Bridges’s character, let him improvise, or bring “closure” to certain plot points; “Hard Corps: The Real Gymnasts of Stick It,” a four minute profile of the stunt performers, which features some incredible moves not in the movie proper; “The Elites,” six full gymnastic routines, with optional commentary by the performers, Nastia Liukin and Isabelle Severino, plus three uneven bar routines in slow motion and optional commentaries, by Severino and Annie Gagnon; and two music videos, “We Run This” by Missy Elliott and Jeannie Ortega’s “Crowded.” Finally there are trailers for other Disney product.

Touchstone’s disc of Stick It hit the street on Tuesday, September 19th, retailing for $29.95.

 

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