Not Another Teen Movie (2001)
★★½ — Not Another Teen Movie (2001)
Here's the thing about spoof movies: they live or die on whether you can keep the jokes coming fast enough that the audience never gets a chance to clock how thin the whole enterprise is. Not Another Teen Movie clocks in as a film that absolutely knows what it's doing, cheerfully dismantles every high school movie cliché you've ever seen, and then... runs out of steam long before the credits roll. It's funny. It's also exhausting. And I mean that in roughly equal measure.
What it gets right, it gets genuinely right. The teen movie playbook is absurd when you step back and look at it, and this film does exactly that, with the volume cranked all the way up. The "ugly girl" who just needs to take off her glasses and let her hair down. The impossibly rigid popularity hierarchy. The big prom night that somehow hinges on one person's personal growth. The sports team that absolutely will not lose when it matters most. Every one of these gets thrown into the blender, and the result, at its best, lands with sharp, satirical timing. There are moments here that made me properly laugh out loud.
And then there's Chris Evans. Yes, that Chris Evans. Long before he was wielding a shield for Marvel, he's here playing the impossibly perfect jock with a commitment to the bit that's honestly impressive. He's clearly in on the joke, and he throws himself into the silliness without a hint of self-consciousness. Every scene he's in has an extra charge to it. Worth noting if you ever want to trace back where that screen presence came from. (For what it's worth, I found him considerably more watchable here than in Daredevil (2003), where the early superhero era was still very much finding its feet.)
The trouble is the joke has a shelf life, and that shelf life is probably about forty minutes. You clock the formula early: pick a trope, exaggerate it to breaking point, move on to the next one. Rinse, repeat. By the time the film is stretching into its back half, you're essentially watching variations on gags you've already processed. The plot barely exists, which is entirely the point, but it means there's nothing to hold the whole thing together when the laughs thin out. The characters are walking punchlines, nothing more, which works in a sketch but starts to wear in a feature.
It's clearly drawing from the same well as Scary Movie, which came out around the same time and arguably perfected this particular spoof format. The difference is energy. Scary Movie had a relentless, almost manic pace that didn't give you room to breathe between gags. This one is looser, more amiable, and that looseness is both its charm and its problem. It's funnier to watch than it is to think about afterwards. I'd reached the car park before I'd already half-forgotten most of it.
There are worse ways to spend an evening, especially if you've got a soft spot for the John Hughes era films that this is gleefully sending up. The humour is dumb, frequently juvenile, and entirely self-aware about both of those things. If that's what you're after on a Friday night, it delivers. It's not trying to be Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004), which has the sustained comic architecture to hold up across repeated viewings. This is more of a one-and-done affair.
So: entertaining in bursts, forgettable in full, and exactly as advertised. Not another classic. Just another spoof comedy doing its thing with a knowing wink. Two and a half stars.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 2001 | Watched: 2025-10-21
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
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Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from the 2000s: Kirikou and the Wild Beasts (2005) · Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004) · Daredevil (2003) · Apocalypto (2006)
More comedy: The Eagle (1925) · The General (1926) · Americana (2023) · The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988)
