Remember that movie about a high school geek who gets the most popular girl in school to be his girlfriend to boost his own image only to discover that fitting in isn’t worth sacrificing his individuality? Or was that a Saved by the Bell episode? Love Don’t Cost a Thing is the latest teen comedy to follow that formula to a fault: Alvin Johnson (Nick Cannon) is an outcast teen with no style and he’s ready to do anything to shed his nerdy image. Even his father (Steve Harvey) an old-school ladies’ man wishes the boy would get out and socialize more. So when the popular Paris Morgan (Christina Millian) wrecks her mother’s Cadillac Escalade Alvin an amateur mechanic offers to fix the vehicle and pay for the parts if she will pretend to be his girlfriend for two weeks. A haircut and several Sean John warm-up suits later Alvin becomes “Al ” an ultra-smooth guy who’s “got all the 411s.” Of course Paris starts to fall for Al who’s too busy keeping up his “big pimpin'” facade to notice. But after alienating everyone close to him including his childhood friends stylin’ Al learns a valuable lesson about being himself.
Cannon‘s performance in Love Don’t Cost a Thing falls short of the impressive one he delivered in the musical drama Drumline–his first lead role in a feature film. Here it’s impossible to sympathize with the 23-year-old Cannon‘s clownish character even when he is needlessly bullied by jocks. With his crazy uneven Afro and spastic walk even Molly Ringwald‘s goody-good character Samantha in Sixteen Candles might be tempted to point and laugh. But while the movie’s hero doesn’t score many points other characters do notably Al’s gal pal Paris played by songwriter/actress Millian who has written songs for Ja Rule and appeared as a guest on several TV shows including Charmed and The Steve Harvey Show. She delivers a very sincere performance as the “frappuccino with hips ” and although audiences should despise her character for prostituting her popularity and lying to just about everybody Millian manages to morph Paris into a likeable personality–and we can’t help but go along for the ride. But mustachioed comic Harvey steals the show as Al’s loveable father Clarence a man who still boogies to his 8-track collection and gives his son very valuable life advice including how to open a condom wrapper using only one hand.
Writer/director Troy Beyer‘s Love Don’t Cost a Thing is so visually horrendous that it should have been called This Film Didn’t Cost a Thing. Beyer who directed the dire 1998 comedy Let’s Talk About Sex and penned the even worse 1997 B.A.P.S. doesn’t much improve her track record in 2003. Her guidance here including sound light and action is so amateurish that the film seems unfinished. An outdoor party scene for example is so dark it’s difficult to make out the characters on screen and in another scene inside the school the sound is so muffled the character’s lines are barely audible. Beyer‘s screenplay adapted from the mind-numbingly bad 1987 comedy Can’t Buy Me Love doesn’t help matters either; most of the characters remain as shallow and label-obsessed as they were 15 years ago. And while there have been countless Hollywood films revolving around the same theme many have done so successfully including the aforementioned oldie Sixteen Candles and more recently The New Guy.
