Tell the limo to drive right past this 'Prom'

By Claudia Puig, USA TODAY

Note to tweens, adolescents and nostalgically inclined adults: Dusting off your own or the parents' high school yearbooks and having a laugh about bad hair and tacky dresses beats making a date for Prom.

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  By Richard Foreman Jr., Disney Enterprises

  Unlikely couple: Jesse (Thomas McDonell) and Nova (Aimee Teegarden) fall for each other after being forced to work on prom together.

By Richard Foreman Jr., Disney Enterprises

Unlikely couple: Jesse (Thomas McDonell) and Nova (Aimee Teegarden) fall for each other after being forced to work on prom together.

Here's a by-the-playbook movie if ever there was one. The machinations leading up to the big night are hardly worth the fuss: Prom's entertainment quotient comes up deficient.

Familiar stories leading up to the big dance intersect clumsily. Nova (Aimee Teegarden), the over-achieving head of the prom committee, can't stand Jesse (Thomas McDonell), the long-haired bad boy who cuts class and zips around on a motorcycle. He scoffs at her beloved high school rituals. But wise Principal Dunnan (Jere Burns) throws them together to work on prom decorations. Though outwardly surly, Jesse is actually a softy who's devoted to his little brother and hardworking mom. Anyone who's made it past fifth grade can figure out that Nova and Jesse will end up together. Along the way, audiences must slog through a hackneyed prom-dress modeling montage and an inane spy mission to a school with the same prom theme.

The ensemble also includes jock Tyler (DeVaughn Nixon), who goes out with the equally popular girl Jordan (Kylie Bunbury) but fools around behind her back. Mei (Yin Chang) agonizes over telling her sweetly nerdy boyfriend, Justin (Jared Kusnitz), that she got into design school and won't be going to college with him.

These ordinary problems are blown up into melodrama with excruciatingly leaden dialogue.

Prom
* 1/2 out of four

Stars: Aimee Teegarden, Thomas McDonell, DeVaughn Nixon, Yin Chang, Raini Rodriguez, Dean Norris, Faith Ford
Director: Joe Nussbaum
Distributor: Walt Disney Pictures
Rating: PG for mild language and a brief fight
Running time: 1 hour, 43 minutes
Opens Friday nationwide

This is the anti-Kids, a tale of an idyllic, squeaky-clean high school without gangs, drugs, cheating or bullying. The worst offense appears to be cutting class ? and that happens only because the offending kid has to help his mom.

It's not exactly a message movie. Even as it tries to show some depth behind the teen stereotypes, it reinforces them. This is High School Musical minus the singing and dancing. Any episode of Glee or even reruns of Degrassi are more connected to real life than this Disney production.

Events are predictable, and characters seem like cardboard cutouts. More effort is expended devising semi-clever ways for students to ask each other to prom than in giving students dimension. Once invitations are extended and connections formed, caricatured dreams come true.

For the rest of us, this "forever night" merely feels interminable.

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