Is 'She's All That' Really as Good as We Remember?

Now, don’t get me wrong—this is in no way a defense of this year’s gender-swapped remake He’s All That (2021) starring TikTok influencer Addison Rae and actor Tanner Buchanan. Even for people who didn’t grow up with She’s All That (1999), it’s obvious which version of the story is superior (and believe me, Rae’s acting is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to her movie’s setbacks). But the original film also has problems of its own, which older viewers seem to have forgotten in the twenty-two years since its original release. 

Set in the late 90s, She’s All That follows student class president Zack Siler who, after getting dumped by his girlfriend Taylor for a teen reality star, makes a bet with his friends to transform Laney Boggs, the ugliest, most socially outcast girl in school, into that year’s prom queen. After one haircut and contact set later for Laney, they fall in love, fall out when Zack’s friend reveals the bet, and reconcile at the end after Zack reveals a swooning one-liner that would only work in the movies. 

Granted, there are a lot of reasons to love She’s All That. When I watched it with my mom, we’d laugh at Laney’s falafel hat that I secretly loved, Matthew Lillard’s absurdly long dance numbers, that mesmerizing scene where Laney and Zack almost kiss in her basement. Her family was hilarious too, especially her dad who would always answer the Jeopardy! questions wrong instead of noticing that there were suddenly a dozen teen boys cleaning his dining room. 

In contrast, we as the audience don’t care about the characters in He’s All That. Bad acting and blatant food sponsorships aside, we don’t know anything about the leads to be invested in their love story so the serious moments bear little weight, the more comedic moments fall flat, and the role social media plays in the story reveals a lot about the screenwriter and his severe disconnect from modern teen life. 

But that doesn’t mean we can’t call out the original for its terrifyingly charged objectification of women. Sure, misogyny is inherent in this movie’s concept and is bound to come up throughout but it’s not punished enough by other characters to feel satisfying.

In the beginning, when Zack and his friends are trying to choose which girl to pick for the bet, they point out girls’ “big racks”, their weight, their size. And Zack is an active participant in this discussion, even at one point saying he could handle a fat girl but not Laney Boggs. 

You could argue that teen boys are just stupid that way and hey, he’s not as bad as his friend Dean, who sexually assaulted Laney until she blew an airhorn in this ear. After all, Zack is accepted to the top Ivy League schools in the country, right? He’s nice to his sister, gets along with Laney’s brother, and even defends him from bullies for her sake. 

But he’s also the kind of guy who is so persistent that his interest in girls is more about him than it is about them. Bet or not, there are real-life guys who would find a girl’s place of work, visit her at home without warning or revealing how he knows where she lives, and convince her to go on a date with him, even if it’s obvious she wants him to leave. Yet both Laney and the audience excuse it because he’s cute and the love interest, and we’re rooting for them to get together at the end. 

On top of that, he never really apologizes for making the bet in the first place. Rewatch their make-up scene and you’ll notice he says, “I made that bet before I knew you. Before I really knew me” (which doesn’t actually mean anything), not even “I’m sorry,” and gets the girl anyway without real remorse or accountability. 

Yet more than twenty years later, it’s still hailed as one of those teen movies you just have to see because our parents or older cousins saw them when they were our age and grew a nostalgic connection to them. Who will spit on any remakes or any modern teen movie made decades later because the genre isn’t “what it used to be.” 

But take teen movies even older than She’s All That, like Sixteen Candles (1984), which perpetuated harmful Asian stereotypes and made the love interest Jake Ryan seem like a hero even after he encourages his friend to date-rape his own girlfriend. Or Breakfast Club (1985) that saw John Bender put his face under Claire’s skirt without consent, which was just written off as a joke. 

In high school, it was hard to watch these with my mom because she had such a strong nostalgic connection to them and hadn’t even remembered the more questionable elements that wouldn’t even be included in today’s movies, much less joked about or condoned. When we don’t watch old movies for a long time, we either tend to forget the problematic issues they raise because our brains would rather not remember or excuse them because of their staunch importance in our childhoods, and I’m certain this is what happened with She’s All That. 

To be honest, I can’t even watch most old teen movies anymore because inevitably, there will be something that didn’t age well or shouldn’t have been included in the first place. And you can call my generation “sensitive” and “annoyingly P.C.” but personally, I’d much rather watch movies that aren’t going out of their way to harm marginalized groups instead of romanticizing what doesn’t need to be remembered. But maybe that’s just me.