CHRISTINA MILIAN, RACHELE BROOKE SMITH
By Jae-Ha Kim
Amazon.com
September 1, 2009
Like its predecessors in the Bring It On franchise, Bring It On: Fight to the Finish focuses on a perky cheerleader who’s taken out of her comfort zone and ends up excelling in her new environment.
This time around, the focus is on Lina Cruz (singer Christina Milian), whose family moves from East Los Angeles to Malibu. The streetwise teen makes an instant frenemy of alpha female Avery (Rachele Brooke Smith)–also a cheerleader–at her new school. Never mind that the two girls don’t get along.
There’s more drama when Lina and Avery’s brother Evan (Cody Longo) fall for each other. Though Lina describes her new classmates as living “lifestyles of the rich and annoying” and Avery refers to Lina and her Latina friends as “illegal cheermigrants,” the two really aren’t that different.
Both live for cheerleading and are super driven when it comes to their sport of choice. The viewer gets the impression that if both girls shared the same ethnicity (or at least a similar bank account), they’d be besties at school.
The Bring It On franchise was spawned by Kirsten Dunst’s hit film from 2000, which clearly had better writing and acting, as well as a larger budget to work with.
While films like Bring It On: Fight to the Finish aren’t going to win any awards, they do have an appeal to teenage girls and/or cheerleading fans. The plot really doesn’t matter so much as the cheerleading choreography and the driving music behind it. And there’s plenty of both in this production.
