695. Sydney White (2007)

Starring: Amanda Bynes, Sara Paxton, Matt Long

Director: Joe Nussbaum

Running Time: 108 mins

Sydney White is an American film about a teenage girl first attending her new university, however is thrown out of her prospective sorority and forced to stay with 7 dorks, in a modern retelling of the classic story Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs.

Well, this film has a very clear purpose and premise, however it falls flat on its face almost immediately. There aren’t too many very strong modern retellings of classic stories, and this unfortunately is a part of that disappointing group.

Honestly, this ‘adaptation’ is so far from the original story that if you weren’t told that it was one, it would be almost impossible to recognise it as a modern retelling. It tries to be clever with the characters resembling the original ones, but they just seem like generic high school (I know it’s a university, but it feels like a high school film) characters.

Also, when you watch this film, there are so many other movies that come into mind far before you could even think of Snow White. Obviously, it’s a got a mad Animal House feel to it all, while the bulk of the story feels exactly like Mean Girls, and the worst thing is that this film is actively trying to be all three to please the very diverse audiences of those movies.

Meanwhile, the comedy here is incredibly weak. With that horrifically generic high school tone to it, everything is pretty predictable, while the fact that it’s a little bit watered down in order to accommodate the ‘tween’ audience who like both Snow White and Mean Girls means that there’s nothing particularly shocking or exciting to laugh at.

Finally, the performances are just terrible. Of course, the characters are as one-dimensional as anything, but Amanda Bynes in the title role and her supporting cast do very little to try and add even a modicum of depth to the story.

Overall, then, this gets a 5.0, for being totally unfunny, annoying and simply terribly generic.