Bell is an appealingly tart, wheels-always-turning kind of actress, and someday (fingers crossed) she’ll find a film role that suits her as well as her star turn as a snappy peewee private eye on TV’s
Veronica Mars did. We get sparks of the same Veronica spitfire here, and she has a hell of a pratfall into mud that makes one long for a director who knows how to harness her innate screwball physicality. Only sparks, though, and never enough to set off any alarms. Bell plays Marni, a former high school loser who, in adult life, has remade herself as a successful and put-together public relations exec. That reinvention is threatened, however, when she returns home to discover her big brother (
Lone Star’s Wolk) is about to wed her high school nemesis, Joanna (Yustman, a pretty, screechy-pitched zero). In flashback, Bell fearlessly plumbs the depths of high school degradation in full-on brace-face, and the other actors – including the underused Curtis and Weaver, as former high school nemeses similarly forced to reunite – are just as game to get physical, even if the film, so relentlessly been-there, done-that, has only half their stamina. Almost as an afterthought,
You Again poses an interesting question – what if our long-ago bullies were just as psychically scarred by the tormenting as their tormented victims were? – but that curveball is buried under a lot of gunk: dance-offs, sing-alongs, awkward exes, and a dirty-talking White blasting through, I’m afraid, the last bits of her novelty.
That again?



