Film Review: So Undercover

About the film

So Undercover is a 2012 action/ comedy film. It was released at the cinema on 7^th December 2012 in the UK while the film went straight to DVD in America. The film has a run time of 94 minutes and is rated 12A.

Plot

Instead of going to high school like she should have done, Molly Morris decided to drop out in order to work with her ex-cop dad. The duo spends most of their days chasing down petty thieves and people who cheat on their partners. However, when an FBI agent approaches her to work undercover and an extremely important mission, Molly doesn’t have much choice about accepting. The only problem is, Molly has to go undercover in a sorority in college. She isn’t a girly girl and knows nothing about sisterhood or even friendship. Molly is going to have a harder job than she thought if she’s going to crack this case.

What I thought

Having a Cineworld Unlimited card, I will pretty much go and see anything at the cinema if I have the time. This includes films I’m not overly interested in just on the off chance they are better than I thought they would be. However, some films are exactly as bad as I thought they would be.

Miley Cyrus stars as Molly Morris, a girl working with her dad chasing down criminals of a kind. Molly is a grungy kind of girl, not really caring about how she looks or make-up etc. She rides a motorbike, wears hard leather boots and never bothers with her hair. When she gets approached by the FBI to go undercover in a college sorority, Molly knows she is out of her depth. As Molly is a PI before going undercover, I was surprised to see her doing so many terrible things in regards to the way she acted. At the beginning of the film, she had a microphone in her collar and spent a lot of time clearly talking into it. Surely, if you had an ex-cop for a dad and was a PI yourself, you would know that doing that would easily give you away. The detective actions were just really bad and not believable at all.

Cyrus isn’t the best of actresses and unfortunately, this film shows it. Her performance as a sorority girl is awkward and not easy at all to watch. While I assume she was picked for the role for being young and cute, filling the necessary looks to play an undercover teenage, she was just really bad. I definitely wasn’t expecting an Oscar worthy performance from Cyrus but I wasn’t expecting her to be quite so bad either. Character development for Molly isn’t strong either. I don’t feel as though anything about her character changed or developed over the course of the film apart from maybe that she decided to keep wearing dresses at the end.

As for other characters, they are mostly shallow, superficial, blonde sorority girls who are extremely stereotyped. However, the cast members playing these roles somehow do a lot better than Cyrus does. Maybe this is because their characters aren’t supposed to be anything special and really, they just have to act like they really like pretty things, make-up and boys. Can’t be that hard can it? Then there is the FBI agent Armon who is played by Jeremy Piven. Honestly, he was one of the best performances in the film although that wasn’t exactly a hard thing to achieve. There is also love interest Nicholas played by Josh Bowman although he doesn’t get nearly enough screen time to make his character convincing enough or to justify him being there at all.

Although the cast and characters were pretty terrible, some of the plot wasn’t bad at all. There were quite a few twists and turns concerning the bad guys and this kept me guessing over the course of the film. I liked not really being sure about who everyone was and whether or not they were actually telling the truth. Not all of the plot was great though as there were some especially predictable moments as well as the ending that probably everyone knew was coming. Even though not everything about this film was close to being good, the plot did make up for quite a lot of things. Unfortunately, I think too much was put into a short amount of time so some things weren’t explained as well as they could have been.

So Undercover is an okay teen movie but not one of the best there is.