'He's All That' Has No Idea What It Wants to Say About Influencers, Despite Starring TikTok Star Addison Rae [Review]

Adopting, and gender-flipping, the ’90s teen comedy “She’s All That” for the TikTok generation, Mark Waters’ Netflix film, “He’s All That,” starring a nascent Addison Rae and Tanner Buchanan, isn’t the unmitigated disaster that the initial trailer portended it to be, but that also doesn’t mean that it is any good. Treading on the hallowed grounds of “The Kissing Booth,” “Work It,” and any number of teen ‘comedies’ that Netflix spits out on a weekly basis, “He’s All That” reimagines the Freddy Prince Jr. and Rachel Leigh Cook film, recasting Prince’s jock as a do-good influencer (Rae’s Padgett) and Cook’s nerdy shy-girl as an exasperated hipster (Buchanan’s Cameron). More of a collection of stitched-together scenes than a fully realized film, “He’s All That” isn’t good enough to be entertaining in its own right, but never so tragically terrible that it rises to the level of camp. Instead, Water’s film is merely bland, a boring hodgepodge of Gen-Z references and a workmanlike script that never seems to understand what it’s trying to say.

Essentially retelling the original beat-for-beat, but with appropriate replacements for the outdated “Real World” references, R. Lee Fleming Jr.’s script follows Padgett, a beauty influencer who constantly curates her image, attracting millions of followers who tune in to see what beauty product she’s hawking on a given day. Her reality though is much less glamorous, as she lives with her single mother (Cook), using her influencer money to help pay the bills and pretend that her family is more financially stable than it really is. Upon visiting her wannabe pop-star boyfriend Jordan (Peyton Meyer), whom she discovers is having an affair with – gasp – a back-up dancer, Padgett loses her shit, going viral for the wrong reasons and, finally, taking a bet from her friends to turn the awkward Cameron into the prom king as a means of self-rehabilitation.

From there, you can probably mad-lib the rest of the script, as Padgett glams up Cameron, only for him to discover that it was all for a bet, breaking up their budding romance in the process before getting back together at, where else, prom. Oh, and Kourtney Kardashian shows up to play Padgett’s boss, who not so gently nudges her to document Cameron’s makeover – filming all of her scenes from what looks like her porch on a single day, in one of the strangest bits of stunt casting I’ve seen in a while.

Despite the ever-growing list of supporting characters, this is really Rae’s film, for better or worse. When given broad comedic beats, reaction shots, and any number of metatextual, eye-roll inducing, ‘influencer’ scenes, Rae showcases a small, but workable, range. She’s seemingly more at home in her direct-to-camera monologues, putting on a show for her ever-growing followers. Yet when forced to act out romantic or dramatic moments, his lack of range is distracting, especially against Buchanan, making the most out of a thinly-drawn caricature of what, I think, is an amalgamation of ‘hipster’ and ‘millennial’- complete with a flip-phone, camera, and in-home darkroom. Fleming Jr., who also wrote the original, attempts to play to Rae’s strengths, giving her an unholy number of dance scenes to distract from the severely lacking chemistry between the leads. In fact, the entire film culminates in a literal dance-off at the prom that goes on for an eternity and has absolutely no reason for existing outside of hitting the 90-minute runtime, which feels a lot longer.

Cook, the only returning actress – save Matthew Lillard in a glorified cameo – is relegated to the stereotypical mom role, showing up in a few scenes to reassure Padgett, but mainly staying out the way until she shows up at the end to, of course, see her daughter’s speech in front of the entire school. And what an odd speech that is. While “He’s All That” may have something to say about content curation, and the disconnect between one’s physical and digital lives, whatever commentary present is oddly negated by the casting of Rae, whose monologue on rejecting the impossible standards made by the internet, is deflated by the fact that she’s an influencer who more than likely received the starring role because of her heavily curated online presence. This is not to say that Rae is entirely to blame, as the film seemingly doesn’t know what to do with her other than have her talk about followers and pretend to be shelling for beauty products. But, one wonders what exactly Waters and Fleming were trying to accomplish in creating an anti-social media message whose entire marketing campaign is based around the viral-ness of its star.

“She’s All That” was no masterpiece, with its gender politics aging like a bottle of Two-Buck Chuck, but it nevertheless captured a moment, reflecting the burgeoning symbiosis between film and MTV and, in retrospect, featured a pretty stacked cast. “He’s All That,” on the other hand, doesn’t know what it wants to say about Instagram or TikTok and is never able to sell the relationship between its two leads. By the time Cameron is turned into a mini-Gatsby clone, complete with slicked-back hair and an incredible selection of suits for a high schooler, the film has lost any semblance of an overarching theme. Not self-aware enough to be in on the joke, “He’s All That” is instead just boring enough to eclipse Netflix’s top-ten for a weekend before falling into the algorithm’s black hole, where all the other mediocre teen movies go to die. [D]