Film review: Prom

Prom (U)Directed by: Joe NussbaumStarring: Aimee Teegarden, Thomas McDonell, Nicholas Braun*

SO wet it makes High School Musical look like Carrie, Disney's latest insipid tween fest homes in on the titular American rite-of-passage and views it – in the words of Prom's wholesome heroine – as an evening for "bringing everyone together" rather than as the kind of debauched night full of ritual humiliation, underage drinking and cherries being popped we've come to expect from US films featuring this curiously contrived end-of-school institution.

It stars Aimee Teegarden as Nova, a straight-A, Ivy League-destined scholarship student whose desire to organise the perfect prom belies a deep yearning to be swept off her well-grounded feet. Enter brooding bad boy Jesse (Thomas McDonell), a grunge-era Johnny Depp doppelganger forced to help her organise the school dance after a fire destroys all her hard work with only three weeks to go. Will these chalk-and-cheese clichs fall for each other? Take a guess. Directed with bland competence by Joe Nussbaum, Prom assembles the usual high-school archetypes but stops short of giving them actual personalities that might encourage the target audience to tear themselves away from Glee.