I like Ellen Page a lot.  She was great in Juno, one of the few good things about X-Men 3, and even though The Tracey Fragments wasn't a great movie, she was one of the best parts of it.  The story behind Whip It has so much potential, I wanted to love it too, and with Ellen Page in the lead role I thought for sure that even if the film was generic, it would still be pretty good.  Having seen it, I wish I could still say that.  The truth is that Drew Barrymore makes a mess of what could have been a great film by squandering almost every potentially great moment.

I don't have it out for Drew Barrymore--she is fine in a lot of movies and I think she's produced some things and she's probably got a pretty decent eye for talent and such, but if this film is any indication, she can't direct her way out of a paper bag.  Everything that should have worked about Whip It fell so miserably flat for me that I wondered how it could have all gotten away. 

The main story is basically a retelling of Girls Just Wanna Have Fun with Roller Derby replacing Dance TV and with an overzealous pageant mom replacing a strict military dad.  I can see why Ellen Page was asked to be in it because there are some elements of Juno in there too, and pieces of pretty much ever fish-out-of-water coming-of-age story ever told.  Yes, we get it that Bliss doesn't want to be in pageants and that she finds herself through the camaraderie of Roller Derby, but there needs to be more to the movie than that.  The script tries, but the scenes never have the weight they need to succeed.

Perhaps its an unfair comparison, but I found Bliss' character arc quite similar to the story of Hannah in the excellent documentary American Teen.  Hannah is a free spirit, a creative soul who doesn't fit into the small, football-centric world of her small town.  She experiences heartbreak, then acceptance, and eventually a kind of uneasy freedom as she makes a break for it.  Bliss is a lot the same, but none of those themes really resonate.  There's one tiny scene where she explains to her parents that she is 'in love with (Roller Derby)' but that's it.  There's one tiny scene where she gets real with her mom, but that's it.  There's one scene where she gets to cry to her friend that feels dissed, but that's it.  None of these scenes mean much on screen even though I think all of the plot points are there for this to be a really great story, and I can only pin that on the director.

One need look no further than Barrymore's own performance in the film to see that she can't do much with actors.  I guess she's supposed to be a wild, out-of-control pothead or alcoholic but all of that is constantly played for laughs and Barrymore seems like she's in the middle of an SNL skit instead of a movie.  Kristin Wiig is actually pretty good in the film, but she's more or less doing a toned down version of a character from SNL too.  Jimmy Fallon is completely unfunny and his in-game commentary actually deflates most of the Roller Derby scenes.  He also gets the unwelcome task of explaining the rules of Roller Derby to the audience about three times so that the mouth breathers can keep up.  Even Page seems like she's phoning it in, and some of that is probably due to the editing that never gives the film the pace and cadence it needs.  In fact, there's one scene with Page dragging some trash bags where the visual gag and the dialogue joke are so poorly timed that something that would have been funny is just wasted.

I don't pretend to know how to make movies, but I can tell you when I see something that just isn't working.  This film is that all over the place, and that's sad because it really could have been pretty great.  At the screening we saw, even the Roller Girls in attendance weren't hooting and hollering which leads me to think that this isn't the movie that anyone wants it to be.  If you cut out some of the cussing and toned down the sexual themes you could probably sell this as a great girl-power movie for tweens, but as it is, it's just a little too bland to work for anyone.