Shakespeare comes back from the dead to haunt us once more in this teen movie based on his play Twelfth Night. Amanda Bynes holds her own fairly well throughout the film, but her acting is still too Nickelodeon for the big screen. Something about her demeanour doesn’t sit well with me: she has the personality of a twelve-year-old boy, the body of a supermodel, and the face of a Cabbage Patch Kid. But maybe that’s what makes this quirky, sometimes corny film work.

She’s the Man has a rough time of it at the beginning, as we are introduced to tomboy soccer-player Viola. Then, without a moment’s pause, we witness her semi-sex change. Everything happens very quickly and we are thrown into Viola’s tangled web of love, sport, and gender conflict. As the movie progresses, the jokes get funnier and the plot moves more slowly, allowing for the development of some confusing relationships between Viola, as a man, and Olivia who is the object of affection of Duke, the male roommate on whom Viola secretly crushes. I always thought that relationships where one partner finds out the other is the opposite sex can never end well, but, as teen comedy would have it, they can.

The movie also introduces important ideas that many teenagers deal with, which makes it a little less of a farce. Underneath the shows of random catfights and nudity, there lie moral questions about sexism, parental expectations, and peer pressure. Shakespeare would be somewhat proud.