If I were the creator or the person responsible for a movie titled Full of It starring a kid whose only claim to fame is being Asthon Kutcher’s little buddy from the show Punk’d I would be nervous, nay, quivering at this point. This is the sort of movie that makes it fun to be a film critic. The type of flick that has critics from all over sitting around it like hyenas, cackling and licking their chops. A film so inauspiciously terrible that its only known purpose is to be torn apart at the hands of people like me. With that said, let the massacre begin.
Full of It, coincidentally is only 2 letters away from being the most honestly titled film of the year. It stars Ryan Pinkston (Punk’d) as Sam Leonard, a nerdy little guy who has just moved to a new school and is fighting to fit in. And by fighting to fit in, I am referring to the incessant lies he tells to make himself seem popular. The only problem is that Sam, in his infinite wisdom as a 17 year old falls for the classic teen movie plight of accidentally breaking a mirror and summoning some divine intervention. In this case, divine intervention is not that the movie ends after the first 30 minutes, it is that Sam’s lies begin to come true. All of the sudden he is driving a Porsche instead of his bike, his previously stale parental unit now consists of a Liberal (Vagina drawing) artist mother and a washed up 80s hair metal rocker dad. And as if that wasn’t enough, puberty has also left him with a “fire hose” in his gym shorts. All this to impress the hottest girl in school, Vickie Sanders (Amanda Walsh). Of course, as these things always go Sam’s lies get deeper and his life begins to spin out of control. I smell a moral lesson coming on, don’t you?
Full of It is a terrible knock off of Mean Girls, sprinkled with the concept of Freaky Friday minus a pre-party whore era Lindsay Lohan. But that doesn’t steer some of Hollywood’s more dubious personas from making cameos. Craig Kilborn, most notable for his sleazy performance in Old School, plays a High School guidance counselor with an affection for prescription medication and no useful advice. He does manage to deliver the movie’s only bit of humor though, with an off the cuff comment about wanting to live next to a Xanax factory with no locks. Carmen Electra also shows up in the film as part of one of Sam’s lies, signaling the actual moment when the film goes from just bad to completely irrelevant and annoying. In fact, the only redeeming performance in the whole darn thing comes from a sultry 10 minutes of Terri Polo (Meet the Fockers) as a teacher who, thanks again to Sam’s lying problem, begins to lust after the little guy like she has the disease and he is the antidote.
Ryan Pinkston is also a problem. This kid is some sort of annoying that I have yet to encounter. His inability to down play his naturally smug disposition and transform into an innocent high school loser ruins the film from the start. Add to that the excessive amount of teen movie clich©s and taboos that make it into the flick (probably thanks to novice Director Christian Charles), and you have a film that is beyond unlikable, it is unbearable, or even, unnecessary. By my standards, this is the worst movie that I have seen this year (by far) and quite possibly the worst film since last year’s Little Man.
Full of It is in theaters March 2, has a running time of 93 minutes and is rated PG-13 for sexual content, drug references, teen partying and crude humor.
