There's a moment in Sleepover when our teenybopper heroines are at an impasse. They need to get into a school dance but don't have tickets, and the ticket-taker won't let them in. So, to steadily rising sentimental music, our protagonist explains her goal: to beat the more popular high-school girls in a scavenger hunt, thus winning the popular lunch spot rather than the geek spot. The ticket-taker is moved by this superficial quest, which clearly strikes a blow for shallow teens everywhere, and allows them in. It's not that I doubt teen girls will relate to this enterprise, but rather that I fear they might.
Alexa Vega of Spy Kids fame plays Julie, the girl who hosts the titular sleepover, inviting her friends: the Mary-Kate and Ashley clone, the fat girl, and the girl for whom they forgot to write a personality. Their adversaries are a popular group of girls led by Farrah (Scout Taylor-Compton). Farrah, of course, is evil because she is popular, whereas our four heroines only want to be popular. For reasons never fully explained, Farrah shows up and challenges the social runner-ups to a scavenger hunt. The prize is the coveted popular-girl lunch spot by the school fountain.
The movie is littered with familiar, half-assed messages about life and growing up. But it also manages to fit in some lessons I hadn't heard before, like fat kids don't have to worry about dating because they can always date other fat kids. Isn't that sweet?
Some of the stops on their Ferris Buellerish adventure are also highly questionable. For instance, after setting up a date with a man she met online, the 14-year-old Julie is required to sneak into a nightclub, pretend to be a swimsuit model, and take a picture of her date buying her a drink. Events take a creepy turn when her date turns out to be one of her teachers. It gets even creepier when, after finally recognizing the baby-faced student for the child she is, he proceeds to warm to her cause and buys her a drink while posing for the requested photo—which undoubtedly will someday be marked Exhibit A.
Of course, I'm taking all of this far too seriously. It's really intended in good fun. But with its lame characters, dopey humor and shallow theme, it rarely even succeeds at that.