Say it loud, yes, Miley Cyrus is Hannah Montana is Molly Morris is Brooke Stanbrooke is so undercover in So Undercover! Yup, while Miley Cyrus is topping our charts with her melodic banger Flowers, it’s probably worth taking a look back at an earlier and rather less successful attempt to reinvent the former teen star. Cyrus has her burnished, post-party girl image down pat these days, but back in 2011, no-one seemed that interested, meaning that the film sat on the shelf for two years and was released in only 13 countries.
So Undercover positions the teen behind the phenomenon of Hannah Montana as a small-time Dallas private eye in the Nancy Drew mould but like totes independent. Of course, Molly Morris has dad issues, and when she’s hired by a man purporting to be from the FBI (Jeremy Piven), she also has undercover issues, because he asks her to enrol as Brooke Stonebridge at a Yale freshman house.
With Kelly Osbourne across the room as her flatmate, Molly is embroiled in a plot involving, drumroll please, some stolen accounting ledgers. It’s hard to imagine fans of the star or the genre getting excited by a rote McGuffin like stolen accounting ledgers, and it’s kind of obvious from the generic quantity of the result that everyone is on a trial run for something else.
That said, So Undercover is not as awful as its straight-to-landfill release in the States might suggest and Cyrus has star quality, admittedly not well applied here. While the poster promises some Mean Girls snark, it’s actually a very simple time-passer for teens, and the vanilla result gives little suggestion of the super-confident adult star that Cyrus has become by 2023.
I am a fan of Miley singing, new album very good, but can live without this. Nope.
She’s great now, then, not so much..:
Have you seen the Backyard Sessions she has done for Disney? Amazing live performance of some of her new album.
I will check that out, watched some of her acoustic stuff on YouTube.
Think the latest ones are taken from it, but on Disney there’s a bit more to it.
[takes a break from writing up his notes on Olivier’s Hamlet to see what Eddie’s covering]
Yeah, checks out.
[back to Sir Larry]
Wut? Olivier would have killed to front a David Guetta banger! If you want to be a serious critic, you have to know the classics, and So Undercover is such a text. I felt the film making and remaking itself as I watched it. Get thee to a library!
Oddly enough, the library system doesn’t seem to have this little gem. Hard to imagine such an oversight.
The first folio given some insight into the creation of Miley’s character. You don’t see Olivier dancing around a swimming pool in a high cut cocktail dress. Didn’t have the imagination or the technology, so he just made stuffy old plays that nobody wanted to see. Insist that you need to see this for professional reason, can’t you get a grant for professional development?
I think I’d have a hard time selling this as development. Perhaps I could point them to this review.
I think Larry would have killed in a cocktail dress.
I’m running an advanced class on Miley Cyrus in Cinema, maybe you should put aside your snobby prejudices about her work, which you have not seen. Watch the Flowers video and admit that it knocks Olivier and Shakespeare into a cocked hat.
I saw her wrecking ball video. I think her dad had all the talent.
He was a huge influence on me, shaped the way I saw music. But I think Flowers may be her Hamlet, a dark meditation on choice and morality.
I thought she melted down and took a naked swing ride or something. Or am I thinking of some other teen girl star?
Yup, I covered this when I was the BBC’s twerking correspondent.
And she came back from that. Amazing.
The human spirit is truly indomitable!
An example to us all. That’s why, instead of a review, tomorrow I’ll be posting TikTok videos of me dancing naked with a giant wrecking ball. It’s the route to glory!
Tik tok is communist Spyware. Thanks for the heads up so I can avoid it.
What am I going to do? I’m never going to NOT dance again, so what are my options? I can email the video if that helps you advise.
You can do one of those little flipbook animation thingys. Where you are a stick figure dancing across the page. And you can mail 100’s, if not thousands, of copies to all your adoring viewers….
She’d had two hundred million viewers for the video she posted last month. Can you guarantee that kind of market exposure?
You want me to watch your stick figure dance across the page 200 million times? I know we’re good online friends, but that seems kind of excessive.
That is what friends are for. Is this a line you won’t cross?
I would have to deliberate greatly before committing one way or another. It could be the quest of a life time and I don’t know if i want to spend my one “life time quest” on that…
You won’t know until you try. Let me know when you get halfway.
I’m still deliberating. A gold dump truck would have helped a LOT in a situation like this….
I’m waiting.
And I’m still waiting for that gold dump truck….
Alex crashed it into a septic tank while pretending to be Boss Hogg in Dukes of Hazzard. Keep up.
Wut?!?
When and where did he do that? I think he comments more than me sometimes.
I’m sure there was discussion of it.
Today?
You mentioned it in the Titans comments, but I’m sure it got a callback.
That was 5 days ago!!!!!
I can’t remember that far back….
Anyway, it happened, we’re all just trying to move on and be our best selves.
Not me.
I’ll take you to Dump Truck Court to get what’s mine!
Rubbish!
Pffffft!