Starring: Hilary Duff, Chad Michael Murray, Jennifer Coolidge

4 out of 10 stars

Hilary Duff's strength as an actress is that, while she looks anything but average and anything but 16, she's extremely adept at playing an average 16 year-old girl. Granted, that's about all she can do. With a range that's rather limited – she's okay when she starts to cry, but can't quite pull off a full-on crying jag, and is kind of funny but not hilarious, etc. – she was always (and probably will always be) suited for the small screen, where inhabiting a charming, familiar persona week-to-week passes for actual characterization and engenders a certain affection. Thus she was perfectly at home in her Disney Channel sitcom Lizzie McGuire, where trials and travails never exceeded a minor blip on an even-keeled scale. But when she tries to flesh out her talents to a feature-length movie, everything starts to wear thin, and you start to wonder: Is this girl going to do anything? The answer, for the time being anyway, is probably not.

Duff glides blandly if amiably through A Cinderella Story, a movie which feels like an overlong Lizzie episode with a very special fairy tale theme: you know, the one where Lizzie has a secret crush on a boy and agrees to meet him at the school dance, but has to leave at midnight, so he, like, never figures out who she is! An okay plot development for half an hour (including commercials), but stretch it out to ninety minutes and you have to live with a sappy prologue with dead dad, many humiliations of Lizzie – er, Sam here – at the hands of her stepsisters, many jokes involving Sam's harridan of a stepmother (Jennifer Coolidge), and an act three plot twist full of such humiliation and downright sadism that even the Brothers Grimm might blanch at it. I mean, no ogre is more feared than a trio of mean high school girls.

Actually, the source that A Cinderella Story steals most aggressively from is Sixteen Candles, and one only hopes that by naming the heroine Sam (after Molly Ringwald's Samantha Baker), the filmmakers were adeptly trying to avoid a plagiarism suit of some kind by making the movie an "homage." So while the trappings of the story have something to do with Cinderella, the fairy tale plot is mushed with a young-unpopular-girl falls for older-popular-boy with an older-popular-girlfriend who's romanced by young-unpopular-geek-sidekick story. (All that's missing is a wacky exchange student.) A half-hearted attempt at updating all this to the digital age includes Sam and her prince, Austin (Chad Michael Murray), emailing and text messaging about their mutual dream of attending Princeton (where, as Sam's dead dad tells her, all the prince and princesses go to college), so they've instantly developed a rapport before ever finding out who the other is. Banished to working at her stepmother's diner, Sam almost misses the chance to go to the school Halloween ball, until diner hostess/fairy godmother Rhonda (Regina King) trots out a wedding dress and a lacey mask. Bingo: Sam and Austin meet cute, but she has to dash off before being crowned princess of the ball. Austin, meanwhile, wallows in his own lunk-headed stupidity, unable to realize that the babe in the barely-there mask is the put-upon girl he goes out of his way to be nice to after his girlfriend makes fun of her.

In the meantime, while you're wondering exactly how stupid Austin is and why Sam is so wimpy (I have a feeling Princeton would frown on such behavior), various bits and pieces of the Cinderella tale are glued to the movie like macaroni to paper, and as such, usually fall off within a matter of minutes. A cell phone is substituted for a glass slipper, and all but forgotten until the end of the movie; Austin's quest to find his princess is written off in about five minutes; the stepsister's pursuit of Austin is limited to even less time; and heck, even Cinderella tried on the shoe and didn't run away crying! Where screenwriter Leigh Dunlap errs most egregiously is in trying to graft on way too much high school drama to the last third of the film. The suffering Sam goes through is not unlike the haranguing Molly Ringwald took in Pretty in Pink when she, too, tried to rise above her high school station. When Ringwald suffered, however, it was (not to stretch it too much) somewhat in the vein of watching Lillian Gish struggle mightily against overwhelming forces; she was noble, she was beautiful, she couldn't win but your heart went out to her. But with Duff, it's like watching a marshmallow Peep slowly get crushed by a thumb – it's mean, kind of gross, and watching it makes your teeth hurt.

Still, despite the obstacles she's put through, both intentional and not, Duff manages to make her way through with only minor damage, and her late-act girl-power rebirth restores a bit of luster to her cheeks, even if she's lecturing directly to the 12 year-olds in the audience. And who knows – perhaps she's smarter than all of us, by making sure almost every part in the film is sorely miscast. Aside from the sassy King and one stepsister, the willowy Madeline Zima (who's a game comic actress with a natural flair for physical comedy), everyone else in A Cinderella Story comes out for the worst. Murray, who was so good in Freaky Friday, is a blank, blonde slate here, and with his squinty good looks comes off as more of a college guy slumming in high school than an age-appropriate suitor for Duff. And the blissfully brilliant Jennifer Coolidge is a pink train wreck as the nasty, evil, Botox-ed stepmother. (Part of Coolidge's charm is in playing characters you'd actually want to be in a room with, and here you want to run screaming from her.) By having those around her suffer in comparison, Duff manages to make her wan rays of charm shine just a bit brighter than you'd expect they would. It may not be an ending fit for a princess, but an actress on her way up couldn't hope for a happier result.