Raise Your Voice

Raise Your Voice - *1/2

After "A Cinderella Story", "Cheaper By The Dozen", "The Lizzy McGuire Movie" and "Agent Cody Banks" all within the past 2 years, Hilary Duff serves up her latest steaming pile of crap with director Sean McNamara and generic male lead Oliver James. Having seen both this movie and "First Daughter" in the past day, and having seen a load of horrible teen movies before, it's getting to the point where you can predict the entire plot of the movie before even starting to watch. I can't even begin to count the number of times a misunderstanding has caused a temporary rift between a male and female lead, or the number of misunderstanding fathers who finally come to their senses at the end. The brother dying at the start thing was a nice touch, although Jason Ritter is getting in far too many car crashes. They should really think of something new for the guy. Hilary Duff isn't necessarily the problem in the movie, but she never really is. She's a qualified teen actress with a reasonable palette of emotions, but the scripts she chooses are manufactured and templatic. The music in this movie is every bit as bland; not what you'd expect ouf of a school that is supposed to produce such original and bright musicians. There are several subplots I could have done without. In fact, if you removed all those subplots the movie would have been about 10 minutes long. There are a couple of people in this movie who deserve better, and hopefully they'll find it, because the last thing we need is more nonsense like this. Thumbs down.