Bring It On (2000) Review
8/10
Official trailer
I’ve watched Bring It On twice, and both times it was funnier than it had any right to be. It’s more honest about race than almost any mainstream teen film of its era, and it’s structurally tighter than the genre requires.
The film isn’t woke. The racial plot at the center of the story is essential. The Toros cheerleading squad stole their championship routines from the East Compton Clovers for years. The discovery of this fact is the protagonist’s inciting incident. The resolution requires the protagonist to do the harder work of building original material instead of continuing to coast on stolen routines. The race plot isn’t decorative commentary added for points. The race plot is the actual story.
That distinction is what separates Bring It On from later teen films that perform racial awareness without letting it drive the story, and it’s why I like this movie far more than a cheerleading comedy should allow. The premise sounds like pom-pom fluff, and the film turns out to be a sharp, fast, funny picture about theft and what you owe the people you stole from. The cheer sequences have real snap, and I’m on its side from the moment Isis walks into that gym.
The Setup
Torrance Shipman is the new captain of the Rancho Carne High School Toros cheerleading squad in San Diego.
The Toros are five-time national champions. Torrance inherits the team from the previous captain, Big Red, who has graduated. Torrance discovers within the first act that Big Red had been driving down to Compton for years, watching the East Compton Clovers practice, and stealing their routines wholesale for the Toros to perform.
The Clovers’ captain Isis confronts the Toros directly at one of their practices. The confrontation is the film’s structural turning point. Isis isn’t asking for credit. Isis is telling the Toros that the theft is over. The Clovers will be at Nationals this year. They’ll perform their own routines. The Toros will need to come up with something else. Torrance has to choose between continuing the theft or building something legitimate. The rest of the film follows that choice.
Kirsten Dunst As Torrance
Dunst was eighteen years old when this film shot.
The performance is the centerpiece. Torrance could have been a generic teen-movie protagonist defined by her social position. Dunst plays her as a specific person with blind spots of her own and a capacity for growth. Torrance is operating inside a system that’s rewarded her for ignoring how it works.
The arc Dunst plays is the arc the film needs. Torrance starts the film believing she earned her position. She ends the film knowing that what she inherited was stolen and that her job as captain is to do better than what came before. The growth isn’t announced through monologues.
The growth is shown through specific choices: hiring a real choreographer, accepting that the first attempt at original material is bad, doing the work to make the second attempt better, accepting Isis’s refusal of her offered settlement money, and competing at Nationals on legitimate terms.
Gabrielle Union As Isis
Union was twenty-seven years old when this film shot.
The performance is one of the cleanest star-making turns in 2000s teen cinema. The writers could have written Isis as either a stereotype or a saint. Union plays her as a competent leader of a competent team who’s tired of people who haven’t earned what they have robbing her.
The character has dignity without being preachy. Isis doesn’t lecture the Toros. Isis informs them that the theft has been recognized and that the consequences have arrived. The performance never falls into the trap of making Isis the protagonist’s moral guide.
Isis has her own team to lead, her own competition to win, her own life that doesn’t exist for Torrance’s benefit. Union plays this with the weariness of a person who has been right about something for years and is finally being heard about it.
The “Brrr, it’s cold in here” scene with Isis confronting the Toros at their gym gets quoted endlessly, and I think it deserves every bit of that.
Union plays it for accuracy, with no anger to spare and no charm offensive, and I love that restraint. The Toros stole the routines, Isis tells them so, and they’re caught. The scene has the tone of an adult conversation happening in a high school gym, and Union’s performance gives it that tone.
For Writers
Bring It On is the textbook example of how to write race as essential plot instead of as decorative commentary. The Toros stole routines from the Clovers for years. The protagonist discovers this and must decide what to do about it. The antagonist team isn’t a generic rival. The antagonist team is the team the protagonist’s squad has been stealing from. The race dynamics generate the plot instead of being layered on top of an unrelated plot for commentary purposes.
The lesson for writers is that if your story addresses race, class, gender, or any other social dynamic, the dynamic should be structurally necessary to the plot. If you could remove the social content and still have your story, the social content is decoration. Decoration reads as performance. Essential content reads as honesty. Bring It On built its plot around the racial dynamic.
Remove the dynamic and there’s no story. That’s why the film doesn’t feel preachy despite being explicitly about cultural appropriation and racial inequity.
The film isn’t commenting on the dynamic. The film is operating inside the dynamic and letting the consequences drive the action.
The Choreographer Sparky Polastri
Ian Roberts plays Sparky Polastri, the choreographer Torrance hires to develop original routines for the Toros after Isis confronts them. Sparky ranks among the great minor comic characters in 2000s teen cinema. He’s intense, demanding, contemptuous of his clients, and convinced of his own genius. The “spirit fingers” sequence where he introduces his signature movement to the Toros is among the most quoted comedy moments in the film.
The character is also a vector for the script’s central comedy beat: Sparky sold the same routine to multiple teams that all show up to the same competition wearing identical choreography.
The reveal is one of the film’s most efficient gags. Torrance hired Sparky thinking she was buying originality. She was buying mass-produced choreography that other squads also purchased. The Toros have to scrap the work and build something original at the last minute.
The crisis is funny and it also serves the larger arc, since the Toros learn the hard way that nobody sells originality. I think Ian Roberts is the funniest thing in the movie, and I’d happily watch a whole film of Sparky sneering at teenagers who can’t hit their marks.
For Writers
The Sparky Polastri sequences are commit-to-the-bit comedy at a high level. Ian Roberts plays Sparky as if he’s auditioning for the role of legitimate dance auteur. The seriousness makes the comedy work. The “spirit fingers” demonstration is a lesson in selling absurd material with total conviction. Roberts treats the choreography as if it’s groundbreaking. The audience laughs because the gap between Sparky’s investment and the audience’s recognition of the material is what generates the comedy.
If you’re writing a comic character whose function is satire of a professional culture (artistic gurus, motivational speakers, life coaches, business consultants), the lesson is to let the character believe in themselves completely.
Skepticism within the performance ruins the joke. Conviction within the performance makes the joke work. Sparky believes in spirit fingers. The audience doesn’t. The gap is the comedy and Roberts holds the gap for every scene he appears in.
The Earned Ending
The Toros don’t win Nationals. The Clovers do. The Toros come in second.
This ending ranks among the most disciplined in any teen sports film.
The genre conventions demand that the protagonists win. The film refuses. The Clovers were the better team with the more original material and the more deserved victory. The Toros gave their best performance with their first original routine. The performance wasn’t enough to beat the Clovers, who had been doing their own work for years while the Toros were stealing it.
The script lets Torrance accept the second-place finish as honest instead of tragic. She did the work, the work wasn’t enough this year, and the work will continue.
The handshake between Torrance and Isis at the end is the moment that sold me on the whole film, because both characters know exactly what just happened and neither pretends otherwise. I think refusing to hand the Toros that trophy is the bravest thing a teen movie of its era did.
For Writers
The Bring It On ending shows how protagonist defeat can satisfy more than protagonist victory. The genre conventions of the teen sports film demanded that the Toros win Nationals. The script refused. The refusal gives the film its moral weight. If the Toros had won, the racial dynamic would have been resolved through white triumph despite the theft. That would have undercut the entire premise. The Clovers winning is the only structurally honest outcome. Torrance accepting second place is the only character-honest outcome.
Both honesties combine into an ending that’s more satisfying than the conventional victory ending would have been.
The lesson is that protagonist victory isn’t the only available ending and is sometimes the wrong ending. If your protagonist winning would falsify the moral structure of your story, your protagonist should lose. The audience will read the loss as integrity instead of as failure if the loss is structurally earned. Bring It On is the textbook case of this principle in commercial filmmaking.
Most teen films wouldn’t have had the discipline to refuse the victory ending. The films that do are the ones that endure.
The Supporting Cast
Eliza Dushku plays Missy Pantone, the gymnast who transfers to Rancho Carne and is reluctantly recruited to fill an open Toros spot.
The character is the film’s outsider perspective on the squad. Missy is good enough to perform at the cheerleading level but contemptuous of the culture. Dushku plays her with the kind of dry edge that gives the squad an internal critic who’s also competent. The role established Dushku in the post-Buffy phase of her career and remains one of her best film performances.
Jesse Bradford plays Cliff Pantone, Missy’s brother and Torrance’s romantic interest.
The performance is fine without being unusual. The romance is where the film loses me. It exists because teen movies require romantic subplots, and the script doesn’t give it enough detail to rise above the requirement. The best scenes between Cliff and Torrance are the mixtape exchange and the late-night talks about cheerleading politics. I’d have cut half the courtship beats and handed those minutes to Isis and the Clovers, who deserve far more screen time than they get.
Lindsay Sloane plays Big Red, the graduated former captain, in flashbacks and brief return appearances. Sloane calibrates the performance exactly. The film depicts Big Red as gleefully unrepentant about the theft. She thinks the Toros’ success justifies the means. Sloane plays this without softening. That’s correct. Big Red is the film’s clearest villain even though she’s mostly off-screen.
Clare Kramer plays Courtney, the senior co-captain who challenges Torrance’s leadership.
Nicole Bilderback plays Whitney as the other senior. The two of them function as the squad’s resistance to Torrance’s reforms. Both performances are solid. The supporting Toros are mostly archetypes but the script gives them enough specific lines that they register as individuals instead of as background.
The Cultural Impact
Within the cheerleading film genre, Bring It On was the breakout commercial success and remains the genre’s defining entry. The film grossed ninety million dollars on an eleven-million budget. It spawned five direct-to-video sequels that the original director and cast had nothing to do with: Bring It On Again in 2003, Bring It On: All or Nothing in 2006, Bring It On: In It to Win It in 2007, Bring It On: Fight to the Finish in 2009, and Bring It On: Worldwide #Cheersmack in 2017.
None of the sequels are worth watching. The original is the canonical entry.
The film’s influence on later teen comedy is heavy.
The cheerleading film as a marketable genre didn’t exist before Bring It On and has continued to produce entries because Bring It On proved the audience exists. Fired Up! in 2009 is the male-cheerleader satire that emerged from the genre Bring It On established. Cinemographic conventions for cheer competition staging, choreography filming, and squad-as-ensemble dynamics all trace back to Bring It On as the foundational text.
Scholars also study the film for its handling of race in mainstream teen cinema.
The willingness to make the racial dynamic essential instead of decorative, the discipline of letting the Black team win at the end, and the refusal to soften Big Red as a villain are all considered model choices for how white-protagonist films can address racial dynamics without falling into either preaching or evasion. The film doesn’t solve race, but it acknowledges that race is operating and gives the consequences real weight.
That’s a more useful contribution than most films of its era managed.
Craft: Peyton Reed’s Directorial Career
Craft Note
Peyton Reed made his feature debut with Bring It On, and it’s the foundation of one of the more underrated directorial careers in contemporary American filmmaking. Reed’s specialty across his career has been taking high-concept commercial premises and finding real warmth and craft inside them. The premises change but the approach stays consistent.
In 2000, Bring It On took the cheerleading drama and made it about racial politics and cultural appropriation. Down with Love in 2003 took the retro Doris Day pastiche and made it about feminist self-knowledge. The Break-Up in 2006 took the romantic comedy and refused to give the audience the reconciliation the genre demanded.
Yes Man in 2008 took the Jim Carrey vehicle and built a coherent philosophical argument inside it. Ant-Man in 2015 took the smallest-stakes Marvel character and built a heist film around him.
The Ant-Man sequels expanded the approach to family drama within the superhero genre.
The through-line is that Reed treats commercial material with the same craft attention most directors reserve for prestige projects.
The films aren’t pretentious, and they aren’t lazy either. Reed cast Bring It On with actors who could do the choreography, hired real cheerleading consultants, filmed the competition sequences as if they mattered, and committed to the racial-politics plot as if it were the actual subject of the film instead of a layer added for marketing. The discipline of the debut became the discipline of the career.
The lesson for analyzing directorial careers is to look at debut features for the methodologies that later features extend. Reed’s later films are recognizable as Reed films partly because the Bring It On approach (high-concept premise, real craft attention, refusal to wink at the material) carries forward. The Ant-Man films are the same approach as Bring It On applied to superhero filmmaking.
Both films take commercial premises seriously enough to find what’s interesting inside them and then build the film around that interest instead of around the premise’s marketing function. Reed is one of the more reliable American filmmakers of the past quarter century and Bring It On is where the reliability started.
Is Bring It On worth watching?
An 8. Bring It On ranks among the best teen films of the 2000s and is the defining entry in the cheerleading film genre. Kirsten Dunst’s lead performance ranks among her strongest. Gabrielle Union’s supporting role ranks among the cleanest star-making turns of the era. Peyton Reed’s debut direction handles the racial-politics plot with the kind of precision most first features can’t manage. The script by Jessica Bendinger is structurally tight and morally honest. The choreography is real. The ending refuses the conventional victory and justifies its second-place finish.
I’ve watched it twice and I’d happily go a third round. It holds up better than most teen comedies of its era because the racial plot carries real weight without any preaching. What keeps it at an 8 instead of a 9 is the limp romance and how little room the Clovers get to be a team with their own story. Fix those two things and I’d be arguing for this as the best teen movie of its decade. As it stands, it’s a happy 8 from me.
The five direct-to-video sequels aren’t worth watching. The original is the canonical entry. Skip everything after.
See also: Fired Up! (2009) review, the male-cheerleader satire that emerged from the genre Bring It On established. Both films are worth watching as paired examples of how the cheerleading film genre evolved across the 2000s.
