Meet Lizzie McGuire, a well-mannered, typical 15-year-old who just graduated from junior high. Typical in that she’s strikingly beautiful, she’s going to Rome on a class trip and happens to meet an Italian teen pop star while she’s there. “The Lizzie McGuire Movie” easily can keep an audience’s attention, but how it does falls somewhere between being entertaining and being dumb.
After a disastrous junior high graduation, Lizzie, played by Hilary Duff, looks forward to leaving junior high and the country behind. After landing in Rome, she and her token platonic friend, Gordon (Adam Lamberg), decide to make each other a promise. They will have many adventures during her stay in Rome. Later we find that she does. He doesn’t.
Led by the hilariously cantankerous Miss Ungermeyer (Alex Borstein), Lizzie’s fast-talking principal with an in-your-face attitude, the group travels through Rome and on day two arrives at the Trevi Fountains.
Enter Paulo (Yani Gellman), a wildly popular, good-looking Italian teenage pop star. Paulo approaches Lizzie as she wanders around the Fountains with her class, and she instantly falls for him. He takes her on rides through the city every day, and wherever the pair goes fans recognize Lizzie as Paulo’s singing partner, Isabella (who is also played by Hilary Duff).
Isabella is out of the country, and since Lizzie bears such a striking resemblance to her, Paulo comes up with a brilliant idea: Lizzie should pose as Isabella and lip-synch on a televised performance.
This builds up toward an expectedly spectacular singing performance at the end with irritatingly catchy pop songs. Somehow Duff winds up singing alongside Duff, but the scene isn’t nearly as cute as in “The Parent Trap.”
The lesson of the movie is if you’re beautiful, wealthy and incredibly lucky, you might just wind up falling in love with or becoming a European pop star. This just isn’t the case. It’s easy to accept Lizzie’s naiveté, but maybe it shouldn’t be.
Lizzie’s conscience, represented by a cartoon, narrates part of the film. If she were a real girl, she would need a cartoon conscience to make the decisions she makes, for Lizzie’s head seems close to empty. Her world is steeped in materialism and egocentricity. When Lizzie’s nemesis Kate (Ashlie Brillault) recognizes a dress Lizzie wears as one she’d worn once before, she labels Lizzie the worst of the worst: an “outfit repeater.” Kate is even worse, according to Lizzie. She’s an “outfit rememberer.”
Duff has talent, presence and beauty, and “The Lizzie McGuire Movie” places her on the list of future pop/screen stars. She has great promise as a star, but the movie wants to make her a pop idol, perhaps the next Mandy Moore as a combined pop and movie star. But is another Mandy Moore necessary?
Despite its shortcomings, some parts of the movie shine. Miss Ungermeyer comes up with consistently entertaining insults.