the audience applauded

A Masterpiece!

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

The acting in this movie is really good.

First off, don't think that the header for this review is a slam. In fact this movie goes out of the way to embrace tropes. It tells you straight up it's gonna go for the bad-ass action and angst filled tropes with GUSTO!It takes all the awkwardness of high school, and all the insanity of action, mixes them and turns them on their head. First off the "ugly duckling" gets twisted a LOT. "Megan" is an orphan raised in Samuel L. Jackson's school where A is for Ammo, B is for Bazooka, and C is for Chainsaw. Our heroine can't help but exam Teen Life through that training, and the lenses of teen movies/books. And makes mistakes because she just doesn't get normal life. Overall, at least for me, a fresh take on yet another teen movie. Oh, and if Sansa had been based on Sophie Turner in this movie, Ramsey would have been fed to the dogs straight up.

Prescott is a top secret government agency that turns orphaned kids into super assassins. One of the kids known as Agent 83 (Hailee Steinfeld) craves to have a normal life and do everything that normal kids do. After a botched mission to take out prolific arms dealer Victoria Knox (Jessica Alba), Agent 83 sees an opportunity to break free from Prescott and enrols in a student exchange programme and moves in with the unsuspecting Larson family. Agent 83 or Megan Walsh as she becomes known as begins to lead a new life as a 'normal' kid, but finds herself ostracised due to her 'weird' ways. Walsh struggles to adjust to her new life are worsened by the fact that the head of Prescott's known as Hardman (Samuel L Jackson) is looking for her with the intention of getting her to leave her normal life and return to Prescott's.The opening 5-10 minutes of this film held a lot of promise and the idea of a kid being a super assassin wanting to lead a normal life certainly looks good on paper, but the weaknesses in the film are in evidence from a very early stage....Before I start I would like to say that I have ticked the 'spoiler' box to cover myself, but in all honesty anyone who has seen a handful of teen films will be able to predict pretty much every scene in this film. Weird girl joins a school, becomes an outcast because of her weird ways, falls for the most popular guy in school despite the fact that a less popular guy who she has more in common with worships the ground that she walks on. Weird girl starts to become popular realising that the popular guy isn't all that and ends up falling for the less popular guy who is actually more interesting and who genuinely likes her. Does all this sound familiar? Yes that's because it is mostly a re-tread of Clueless. In fact the filmmakers actually show clips from the film Clueless and even recreate the Suck & Blow game that we saw in Clueless. This can either be looked upon as Homage or a Rip-Off but given the fact that it seems so obvious in what it's doing here I can only assume that these scenes were perhaps intended as a homage.This lack of originality brings about further problems such as in other areas where the filmmakers directly quote from other teenage films such as Mean Girls and The Breakfast Club. It actually references these films direct and worse still uses quotes or scenes from these films in order to convey character emotions. It's almost like the writers couldn't come up with their own ideas here and just decided to steal ideas from other films. The Clueless example I gave was something I could pass off as Homage, but The Breakfast Club and Mean Girls examples are clearly just ripping off those films.Barely Lethal also tries to be a hybrid of a spy adventure/action film and a coming of age teen dramedy and whilst it is perhaps possible to meld these two concepts together this is not really something that the writers have been entirely successful at here; the 'spy' or Prescott aspect of the story is barely given any focus and seems to clumsily drift in and out of the story whenever it seems to be convenient. They capture Victoria Knox, but then she escapes - quite how she escapes is never explained and doesn't seem important to the writers??? Then she rocks up at the Larson family home to take out Agent 83, has a scuffle with Agent 83 and gets killed when Hardman and his men arrive to save the day. It's a disappointing finale made worse by the fact that Jessica Alba isn't very convincing and seems miscast as a villain here. Although part of the film is about Hardman trying to track down Agent 83, it isn't played out in a way that is particularly exciting and Hardman seems to find Agent 83 far too easily. At one point Agent 83 says to Hardman 'How did you find me'? and Hardman says ' You Tube' OK unless the video contained specific details of the school such as its name and address I'm unsure how you could trace someone from a You Tube video??? The thing that makes this film more tolerable than it should be are down to some of the performances; The likes of Hailee Steinfeld, Dove Cameron and Samuel L Jackson all help to make this a better film than it should be (particular praise going to Steinfeld who I thought was excellent). It's themes about struggling to gain acceptance for being different will always be relevant and again do give the film some worth.However, when the chips are down, I couldn't help but feel that I'd seen a lot of this before in Clueless and for the record Clueless was also a much better film.

This is an easy little movie for those who want something silly, but not the usual way. It is true, what most people said about the movie being full of clichés, but I don't think that is a mistake here. Those clichés are a source of humour here, they jump at you and you ARE meant to notice them and not to take them seriously. Even the characters themselves go against some of them (cheerleaders, or the bathroom "actor" scene, anyone?) which makes the whole movie quite enjoyable. And the relationship between Hardman and the little girls? It's so cute and funny, it made me smile every time.Of course, no movie is perfect. This has some problems as well. The story is a bit under-developed, all that stuff that they put in it would have needed a lot more time to form properly. Sometimes the way that the characters act/react just makes you want to roll your eyes. But it's not THAT bad, or at least no worse than any other movie.All in all, I think this is a perfect movie for those nights when you just want to switch off and laugh for a while. I'd definitely recommend it.

This is in part a farcical takeoff on the kind of teen movie that pits a good, wholesome girl perhaps from the wrong side of the tracks against a clique of socially snobby girls. I have in mind films such as Mean Girls (2004), Pretty in Pink (1986) and Cruel Intentions (1999). Here the premise (she's an orphan trained since childhood to be an international assassin) is more than a bit ridiculous but has the virtue of serving up a heroine as fashionable as TV's Super Girl and Jennifer Lawrence's Katniss Everdeen.Hailee Steinfeld plays the awkward girl trying to have a normal high school life as an exchange student. She's sweet, honorable, emotionally vulnerable and has little idea about how a teenaged American girl should act. However, thanks to her training she is tougher than the biggest dude on campus, which might come in handy.I only want to say one more thing about this surprisingly fun movie: you know the formula: the good girl overcomes the mean girls, rejects the bad boy, and finds the perfect boyfriend (who is not all that popular but is also good and true) and lives happily ever after while the audience lives vicariously in triumph over their own high school demons. Or not. See this pleasant diversion and find out.--Dennis Littrell, author of "Cut to the Chaise Lounge or I Can't Believe I Swallowed the Remote"