Love Don't Cost a Thing

Bomb Rating: 

This film is so inconceivably bad it gave me shooting pains in my head that felt like somebody was trying to drive foot-long pins through my brain with a tuning fork.

I read, like many people undoubtedly, that Roger Ebert liked this film and actually suggested it was better than the film upon which it was based: "Can't Buy Me Love," a 1987 film starring Patrick Dempsey.

This begs several questions: What has happened to Roger? Has he been replaced by a space alien? Has Disney replaced him with an animatronic Roger whose thumb is physically incapable of pointing downward? Does Roger even qualify as a film critic anymore?

This film is so inconceivably bad it gave me shooting pains in my head that felt like somebody was trying to drive foot-long pins through my brain with a tuning fork. The idea here is that Alvin Johnson (Nick Cannon) is a geek, and he pays Paris Morgan (Christina Milian) to pretend to be his girlfriend for two weeks. He believes this will make him popular. Well, it does make him popular and he forgets who he is in the process, dropping his old geeky friends and becoming quite the asshole.

There's not a single moment in this entire film that's even remotely believable. Even Alvin's haircut seems impossible. His 'fro is all over the place and he looks like Dr. J from the '70s. He'd be laughed at every day he went to school and eventually would have gotten a haircut. Nick Cannon is too over-the-top when he's a geek and equally over-the-top as his cool alter-ego. There's no real emotion in the film. It's like every single character is acutely aware that he or she is in a film, a film gone horribly awry.

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