So someone went and remade the 80s classic romantic comedy Valley Girl… only now with 100% less Nic Cage (I rented it on iTunes). I’m not sure who asked for a remake… but, then again, I didn’t like the original in the first place. Maybe the fans – and I know they exist – of that film wanted a remake… but I very much doubt it. Certainly not this milquetoast remake, that’s for sure.
Valley Girl remake is set in 1983, like the original (Sally Ride even takes off in her first flight on the shuttle as if to nail down that timeline). It’s told as a flashback via a framing device – a mom (played by Alicia Silverstone) is telling her daughter about that time she, a Valley Girl, fell for a punk from Hollywood. And that’s the long and short of the plot… a vague fuzzy Romeo and Juliette remake where the stakes are whether your friends can just deal with the new boy/girlfriend.
Oh, and now the movie is a jukebox musical. It’s not just full of some of the usual suspects of 80s pop and new wave, many of those songs are sung by the cast (to varying levels of success). First scene in the mall is We Got the Beat as sung by the lead Valley Girls and danced by the whole mall. We get versions of Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, Material Girl, Bad Reputation, Hey Mickey, Take On Me, Safety Dance, and more.
Note that almost none of these are punk songs… all pop and new wave nostalgia bombs, for sure… but not punk. And the boy from Hollywood is a punk but does nothing but sing these poppy peppy tunes. And that’s because, even more so than Nic Cage in the original, the punk is not very punk. It’s kind of a problem… if anyone really cared. But this whole movie is toothless, clawless, and meek… even by the original’s standards. Is that a crime? I guess not… the movie is a helium balloon of pop songs sung by a fresh-faced cast over a plot with very little weight to it in the first place.
And that’s my general feel for the flick. It’s pretty toothless and pretty harmless and mildly pop fizz enjoyable. You get a milquetoast romance set to some enjoyable (though sometimes cringe) pop tune covers of all your favorite and expected 80s hits. Some of the songs are more memorable than others, the dance numbers kind of minimal and small, and then its over and you may or may not as well have seen it. If you are a diehard original movie fan, you’ll probably hate it… unless you spend all your time toe-tapping to the tunes.
Score: 75