Hollywood has a rule that once a classic story has been converted into a film enough times, a high-school version gets made. The Taming of the Shrew made it through the locker-lined halls in the form of 10 Things I Hate About You, Pygmalion attended class as She's All That, and now it's Cinderella's turn to venture into John Hughes' territory.
The prince's ball has been replaced by a Halloween dance, the pumpkin carriage has given way to a BMW, and the forlorn stepdaughter is now teenybopper sensation Hilary Duff as Sam. Clever? Not really, since A Cinderella Story never commits to any of its time-line changes. For example, Sam leaves her cell phone behind at the dance rather than a glass slipper, but where the glass slipper served as the clue that ultimately led the prince to Cinderella, the cell phone just gets forgotten. I guess football team captain Austin (Chad Michael Murray) isn't quite as bright as Prince Charming, because that also explains why he can't see through Sam's thin disguise at the dance.
The film's conflicts are incredibly overblown. Sam can't reveal her true identity to Austin because she (gasp!) works in a diner. Apparently, this is such a high-school faux pas that the obligatory trio of evil popular girls who walk down the hall in formation even insult Sam by calling her "Diner Girl." So while disliking each other's public persona from across the class barrier, Sam and Austin trade anonymous text messages á la You've Got Mail and fall in love.
When you think about it, the underlying story in Cinderella is the worst kind. The heroine is defined only by her ridiculously exaggerated misery, arbitrarily put upon her by the most unrealistically despicable of people. And in the end, all of these problems are somehow solved by Cinderella getting her prince—a man she wants, first and foremost, simply because he is a prince. It's a tale that is alternately silly and shallow, and yet from as far back as Disney's animated classic to as recently as Drew Barrymore's Ever After, there have been versions that make us forget the story is a superficial, adolescent soap opera. Setting a version in high school only emphasizes those qualities.