Georgia Nicolson is a typical 14 year old girl but in her own eyes she is a freak of nature who will simply never manage to get herself a boyfriend. Even amongst her group of friends (not the most popular girls in school) she is the "nerdy" one. In the pursuit of male contact, she is willing to do whatever it takes whether lying, playing games, pretending to lose cats and having lessons in getting the perfect snog.
From the get-go I think it is important that I acknowledge that I am not target audience for Angus Thongs & Perfect Snogging (which also strikes me as a terrible title). As a man in his thirties, the awkward growing pains of teenagers is something is unlikely to concern me again aside from the unlikely event of me having children in the future. This is not to say that, because I do not fit into the broad spectrum of people that the film is aimed at, that I will hate it or simply dismiss it though - to do so often means that I would miss gems on the basis that they are "not my sort of thing". On watching though, it becomes clearer and clearer that this film will not fall into that category and indeed can be classed more under the "well, what did you expect" box in my mind.
The reason for this is that the film is not particularly good at any one thing. I had some hopes that it would be creative when the opening sequence came on as it was a funny and clever way of saying "outsider" about the character of Georgia. Despite the manner it is said though, the thing that it is saying even at this point is fairly clichéd and sadly it is this path that the majority of the film follows. Again, having clichés in a genre film is not a big deal from my point of view, but to make the film good you have to do something of value with them whether it is twisting them, delivering them well or just adding insight that makes the audience see the clichés as more than that with time. We don't really get that here though because the film seems happy in the middle-ground.
What I mean is that, as one example, it is not particularly funny but the bigger weakness for me was that I didn't think it felt real and it didn't have enough of a creative air to it to make engaging enough in that realm to cover for it. With this sort of thing you do need a strong central character because, if I care for her, then the story has less pressure on it because ultimately it is being told about her and sort of from her perspective. Here though I didn't really buy into Georgia as a person so much as a vaguely developed comic creation. It doesn't help that Groome didn't work for me either, her performance was a bit too obviously flappy and comic (without having the material to support that) effectively knocking the realism out of her performance. Nor did she have enough in the way of charisma to make her awkward fumbling charming or sweet and she didn't have the range to deliver on the more demanding scenes. The side characters are not really used that well either with those with the most potential seemingly left to tiny moments (I liked her little sister as a comic character) while the weaker ones have more put on them - specifically Davies and Taylor were so-so while the other teenagers were mostly only OK.
Overall the film film treads a familiar genre path without a great deal to recommend it for - and trust me, as a British film, I was looking to enjoy it as well as supporting it. As it is though it doesn't do much of note outside of the basics, certainly not enough to give it a boost in terms of being creative or engaging. It is bright and lively enough to appeal as a genre film though and should be appreciated as such, but it left me quite under-whelmed.
