On The Line

Starring Lance Bass, Joey Fatone, and Emmanuelle Chriqui

Playing at Cinemark, Hadley

If when walking into a movie looking for your seats all you can see is a seaful of preteen and teenage girls, you know you are in trouble. Such was the case when Assistant Arts editor Shauna Billings and I (she took notes for me) attended On The Line, the new film starring Nsync heartthrobs Lance Bass and Joey Fat One.

While the film has likened itself to Sleepless In Seattle in its ad campaign, On The Line doesn’t even manage to live up to the low standards of the Tom Hanks film.

Sure, the plot is incredibly predictable (boy meets girl, loses track of girl, gets girl back) and the jokes hackneyed (anybody for a good office joke about how the copy machine doesn’t work?), but that isn’t all that derails On The Line.

The films self-nemesis is its one-dimensional characters, poor dialogue, production, plot, and yes, even acting. Bass plays Kevin, a down on his luck guy, who can never “seal the deal” with the opposite sex. Just to get this point across to the audience, this is mentioned at least a half dozen times. Fatone plays a stereotypical “party animal,” that also happens to be a musician with poor hygiene (hilarious).

An equally weak plot accompanies the weak characters. After meeting the proverbial girl of his dreams (Abby played by Emmanuel Chriqui) on a subway, Kevin doesn’t bother to get her name or address, and spends the rest of the film trying to locate her. But don’t worry, you get your big movie screen kiss at the end – like you didn’t see that coming.

Fatone at least seems comfortable in his role, while Bass looks like a deer caught in headlights (which is his normal look anyway). His style seems incredibly forced and awkward at times. The amazing aspect to this is that his line delivery seems poor even after post production. One can only shudder to think what the rough cut of the film must be like with no editing to mask Bass’s lack of acting acumen.

When fellow NSyncer Justin Timberlake appears in a cameo role as a feminine-acting makeup artist, one can only question why Bass, the least charismatic of the groups members, was the one cast in the lead role. Timberlake’s performance was seriously hilarious, and there is already talk that the producers of “Friends” want to cast him on the show playing a similar character to the one he portrays in the film.

Another noticeable and embarrassing aspect of the movie is the dubbing out of “bad” words such as “ass” and “screw”. To see characters clearly saying one word, while the sound of another comes out is almost unheard of in first run large screen showings of movies. That was until On The Line broke the trend.

The cheesiest moment in movie history also occurs when Bass begins shaking his hips while standing by the copy machine. The teenybopper song “On The Line” (soundtrack available now by the way) is blasting, while the light from the copy machine lights Bass up in god-like fashion in the darkened room. The result is a truly an avant-garde film moment. Bass has his moment of Zen in the scene, where he decides to make an ad (how brilliant, he’s an ad executive after all.) to find his subway lover. This teaches us the life lessen that teenybopper music= self-inspiration.

Our moment of Zen was when exiting, we were walking behind a group of ten-year old girls giggling after they had been royally entertained for the previous 90 minutes. When did we become such high falutin movie critics unable to enjoy the simple pleasures of cinema, like a movie starring the incomparable Lance Bass? I’m not sure, but I do have one question, when is O-Town going to have a movie?