The DUFF

The DUFF (12A)

USA 2015  101 mins  Dir: Ari Sandel  Starring: Mae Whitman, Bella Thorne, Allison Janney, Robbie Amell, Ken Jeong, Skyler Samuels, Bianca A. Santos

In the 27 years since Heathers, the high-school clique movie has required regular updates, from Mean Girls to Easy A – not least because no one’s called Heather anymore. A common screenwriting gambit is to rework out of copyright classics, so The Taming of the Shrew became 10 Things I Hate About You and Emma was reworked as Clueless. This time it’s Shaw’s turn, as Pygmalion is pressed into service to fuel an enjoyable if wholly predictable entry in the genre, whose obsessive namechecking of apps means it’ll feel painfully dated by next Tuesday.

Formula decrees that our ugly duckling heroine should be a clever, witty, occasionally sarcastic outsider and have a cool, quirky hobby that the dim Barbie-types don’t understand (vintage horror movies in this instance). Crucially, she must also not be remotely ugly by any reasonable definition of the term. As Bianca, Arrested Development star Mae Whitman fits the bill admirably.

Bianca’s life changes when her childhood friend and neighbour Wesley (Amell), who has grown into a strapping jock, blithely informs her that she’s a DUFF – or Designated Ugly Fat Friend. This means her role in the school hierarchy is to act as gatekeeper to her more attractive pals Casey (Santos) and Jess (Samuels). As a person, she is invisible. (The film makes a somewhat half-hearted attempt to assert that boys can also be DUFFs, but no one really buys this on screen or off.) Naturally, she recruits Wes to help reverse-DUFF herself so as to attract the sensitive musician fella of her dreams. This necessitates another outing for our old friend the makeover montage.

For all its occasionally rather painful now-ness (“I’m blocking your ass on Tumblr and you’re off my Snapchat!”), there’s nothing here that John Hughes wouldn’t have recognised, from the ideal couple who don’t realise they’re meant for each other to the big prom finale. Bella Thorne enjoys the queen bee bitch role, while Ken Jeong gets to do his rather wearing funny voice thing again as a teacher, and Allison Janney gets an entertaining turn as Bianca’s divorced self-help guru mom, who speaks only in laboured motivational jargon. There are some chuckle-worthy lines along the way (“When I went to high school in the 90s, we didn’t have emoticons – we had actual facial expressions,” opines a teacher), but perhaps not quite as many as the trailer promises. Eventually, the whole thing gets bogged down in a lot of sermonising about self-esteem and cyberbullying. As an earlier generation might have sighed: “Whatever . . .”