4 / 10
Official trailer
A Remake Built on a Bet
He’s All That’s a gender-swapped remake of She’s All That, the 1999 teen comedy in which a popular jock bets he can turn an awkward art student into prom queen. This time, a popular influencer bets she can turn an awkward loner into prom king. The shape is the same, the beats are the same, and the ending is exactly what anyone who has seen a teen romance would expect. Even the supporting characters map neatly onto their 1999 equivalents.
Mark Waters, who directed Mean Girls and Freaky Friday, made it for Netflix, where it premiered in August 2021. R. Lee Fleming Jr., who wrote the original, has a writing credit. It topped the streaming charts for a while, and critics widely dismissed it. I give it a 4. It’s pleasant enough to have on in the background, and there’s little reason to give it more attention than that.
I came away from He’s All That with a shrug and a little irritation behind it. Nothing in it offended me, and nothing in it made me feel much of anything, and that’s my real complaint. A remake of a movie people loved ought to at least try to justify itself. This one seems content to coast on the title and the lead’s follower count.
The film arrived at a moment when streaming services were remaking and rebooting teen favorites from the nineties and early two thousands, hoping to catch both nostalgic parents and their children. Some of those projects found a fresh angle. This one is content to repeat the old one with new phones.
Padgett
Addison Rae, one of the biggest stars on TikTok, plays Padgett Sawyer, a high school student who has built a career as a lifestyle influencer, with sponsors paying for the lifestyle she shows her followers. Her carefully managed image collapses when she livestreams a surprise visit to her boyfriend and catches him cheating, and her meltdown goes viral.
Her sponsor drops her, and to rescue her reputation, her friend Alden challenges her: take the school’s least popular boy and make him prom king. If Padgett can pull off a makeover on camera, she’ll prove her skills as an influencer and win back her followers. The stakes are her career, her income and her pride, and the film makes clear she can’t afford to lose.
The setup is a reasonable update of the original’s premise for the social media age.
The trouble is that the film has little to say about social media beyond the obvious, and it treats the influencer world with the same glossy affection it pretends to criticize. The camera lingers on the outfits, the bedrooms and the brand deals far longer than on the costs. I’d have traded half that glossy footage for one scene where Padgett looks at her numbers and is scared.
For Writers
Padgett’s breakdown goes viral, and her livelihood collapses in a day. The inciting incident is modern, public and immediate, and it sets up the bet.
When you update an old story, finding a modern equivalent for the inciting incident can make a familiar plot feel current, even if the rest follows the original closely.
Asking how the inciting incident would happen today reveals the version that raises the stakes most sharply for the character.
Addison Rae
Rae’s casting was the film’s big selling point, and it was a bold move for Netflix: a performer with an enormous online following and almost no acting experience in a lead role. She’s likeable and natural in the lighter scenes, and she clearly understands the world her character lives in.
She’s less convincing in the dramatic moments, when Padgett has to show real vulnerability or change. Her performance never finds the emotional depth the story needs, and the film’s best moments tend to belong to the supporting cast. It’s not a disaster of a debut, and it’s not enough to carry a film. With better material and more experience, she might grow into a leading role. Here, she’s asked to do too much too soon.
Cameron
Tanner Buchanan, best known for the series Cobra Kai, plays Cameron Kweller, the grumpy loner Padgett chooses. He’s an aspiring photographer who dislikes social media, dresses scruffily and wants nothing to do with the popular crowd. Buchanan plays him with a dry, wary charm, and he’s the most interesting character in the film, a teenager who already knows what he likes and doesn’t care who approves.
Cameron has a family story of his own, and the film gives him a few affecting scenes. The film handles his resistance to Padgett’s makeover, and his gradual thaw, better than her side of the romance. Buchanan and Rae have a gentle chemistry, and their quiet scenes together, away from the phones and the parties, are where the film comes closest to working. I liked Cameron more than anyone else in this movie, and I kept wishing the script had been written from his side of the bet.
The makeover itself is less dramatic than in the original. Cameron gets new clothes, a haircut and a social media presence, and he’s still recognizably himself. The film’s quiet, sensible message is that authenticity beats image. It’s a better idea than the film around it, and it deserved more development.
The Returning Cast
The remake brings back two actors from She’s All That.
Rachael Leigh Cook, who played the original’s transformed art student, plays Padgett’s mother. Matthew Lillard, who played the obnoxious reality-TV star in the original, plays the school principal. The casting is a pleasant stunt, the kind of gesture remakes often make toward the fans of the film they’re replacing.
Both are welcome, and both are underused. Cook has a few warm scenes with Rae. Lillard appears briefly and is gone. For fans of the 1999 film, their presence is the most enjoyable thing about the remake, and it also underlines how much better the original was. Every time Cook appears, he reminds the audience of a film with more energy and more heart.
The Dance
She’s All That famously included a choreographed dance at the prom, an unexpected and much-loved scene. He’s All That includes its own dance sequence as a homage, and it’s fun, colorful and energetic, one of the film’s liveliest moments. The choreography is enthusiastic, the costumes are bright, and the cast looks like it’s having fun.
The problem is that it’s a copy of a surprise, and a copied surprise can’t surprise anybody. The original’s dance worked because nobody expected a teen romance to stop for a full dance number. The remake knows it’s expected and delivers it dutifully, like a box being ticked. This is the scene that irritated me most, because the cast is clearly trying and the choreography is lively, and the film still couldn’t think of one thing to do with it that the 1999 version hadn’t already done.
There’s a lesson in that for any remake. Audiences remember best the moments in an original that caught them off guard, and those moments can’t be repeated. A remake has to find its own surprises, and He’s All That never looks for any.
For Writers
Even the surprise dance number comes straight from the original, and a copied surprise isn’t a surprise. The audience expects it, so it has no power.
If you echo a scene your readers know, twist it: change its outcome, its meaning or its placement, so it surprises them in a new way. When you pay homage to a famous scene, reproducing it rarely works. The original surprised because nobody saw it coming.
Influencer Culture
There was an obvious opportunity here to say something interesting about social media: about the pressure on young people to perform their lives for strangers, about the money and anxiety behind the perfect images, and about the gap between online and real identity. It raises these ideas and then skates past them.
Padgett learns that being real is better than being liked, and the film ends with her choosing authenticity over her brand. It’s a nice lesson, and the film doesn’t back it up, because it spends most of its running time enjoying the glamour it claims to question. It looks like an ad for the lifestyle it’s supposedly critiquing, and the irony isn’t intended.
The casting of Rae, a real influencer, adds another layer, and the film never quite knows what to do with it. A braver script might have used her real experience to say something pointed about fame online. This one plays it safe and lets the casting speak for itself, and it doesn’t say much.
For Writers
It criticizes influencer culture while celebrating its glamour. Its message and its images point in opposite directions.
If your story questions a way of life, the way you present that life on the page has to support the critique. Otherwise the reader believes what you show over what you say.
Look at how you describe the world your story criticizes. If the descriptions make it more attractive than your argument makes it look bad, rebalance them.
Mark Waters
Mark Waters directed two of the sharpest teen comedies of the early two thousands, Freaky Friday and Mean Girls, and it’s surprising how little of that sharpness survives here. Mean Girls had Tina Fey’s script, full of precise, quotable cruelty and real insight into how teenagers wield status. He’s All That has a script that states its themes out loud and moves straight on, without ever testing them against its characters.
Waters keeps the film moving and gives it a clean, bright look, and the comic timing in a few scenes shows his experience. He can’t fix the material. A director can sharpen a good script, but he can’t supply the ideas a thin one lacks, and the finished film looks polished and feels empty.
Why She’s All That Still Works
The 1999 original is no masterpiece, and it has its own clichés. It still has more energy, more surprise and more charm, because it was among the first teen films of its era to play the makeover plot with a knowing wink. Freddie Prinze Jr. and Rachael Leigh Cook had real chemistry, and the film had a sharp supporting cast.
What’s left feels like a product designed around a formula, a famous name and a streaming algorithm.
It’s professionally made and never offensive, and nothing in it feels urgent or alive. Put the two side by side and the original looks like a film someone wanted to make, and the remake looks like one someone was asked to make. That’s its central weakness. The man who directed Mean Girls deserved a better assignment than filling a content slot.
What Works
It isn’t all bad. Tanner Buchanan is good, the supporting cast is likeable, the colors are bright, and the film moves quickly. Viewers who enjoy teen romances and don’t mind predictability will find it pleasant, undemanding company, and younger viewers who haven’t seen the original may enjoy it more. Without the comparison, it’s a serviceable teen romance.
It’s also harmless. There’s nothing mean-spirited in it, the characters are kind to each other in the end, and its message about being yourself is sound. It’s the kind of film that’s easy to watch and easy to forget, and it’s exactly as ambitious as it needs to be for a streaming release.
Where It Falls Flat
The script is predictable from the first scene, the dialogue is flat, the satire of influencer culture has no bite, and the lead performance lacks the depth to carry the emotional turns. It borrows its best ideas from the original and adds very little of its own. Critics were unkind, and the harshest reviews were justified.
It gets a 4. Watch the original instead, or watch this one on a slow evening if you’re curious to see Addison Rae act or want a gentle, familiar teen romance. Don’t expect it to surprise you. Every turn arrives on schedule, and the ending is visible from the first ten minutes. For some viewers, that predictability is the appeal.
Craft Note
Craft Note
This remake updates a proven formula with a modern setting and a famous lead, and it never adds a new idea. The result is competent and forgettable.
A remake or retelling needs a reason to exist beyond the original’s success. A fresh setting isn’t enough without a fresh point of view. Before retelling a familiar story, write down one thing your version will say that the original didn’t. If you can’t, find it before you start writing.
The Verdict on He’s All That
It’s a 4, and it ends up there because the film never commits a real sin and never really tries either.
Tanner Buchanan and the returning cast are worth something, and nearly everything else is borrowed from a better movie. If you’re choosing between them, watch the 1999 original, because it still has the energy and nerve this one skipped. The remake is pleasant background noise, and I wish a director this capable had aimed higher than that.
