Stars: 2/5
Sometimes you shoot your shot and things are great, and sometimes you get drunk and blow up the entire court with TNT, including your target. Netflix, you TNT’d us. And I really wanted to like this movie since it was filmed and set in New Orleans. 
The movie focuses on titular tall girl Jodi Kreyman (Ava Michelle). Jodi has been bullied all her life due to her height. She is overly concerned with all six-feet-and-one inch of herself, to the point where she stopped playing piano because she didn’t want to attract attention to herself. Her paranoid but well-meaning father makes matters worse by presenting Jodi’s height as a potential health issue. 
Jodi’s entourage consists of her sister and pageant queen Harper (Sabrina Carpenter) and best friends Jack Dunkleman (Griffin Gluck) and Fareeda (Anjelika Washington). Harper and Fareeda are aggressively supportive of Jodi, while Jack is obsessed with her, but she won’t give him the time of day because he’s quite shorter than her, too forward and entirely quirky. 
Per Newton’s first law, newcomer Stig (Luke Eisner), a taller-than-Jodi blonde foreign exchange student from Sweden shakes things up in Jodi’s life and brings her into direct competition with mean girl Kimmy (Clara Wilsey), proving that sometimes we may not even consider someone romantically because they don’t seem like a good fit when they actually know us better than anyone.  
This movie is flat — no interesting characters and no real character development whatsoever. All five-feet-and-two inches of me cringed the entire movie. Jodi is such a bizarre character because she is smart and talented yet bullied so easily about something that should actually make her more confident. Not to mention, she was so uninteresting. 
Sabrina Carpenter is a seasoned actress. Director Nzingha Stewart could’ve done so much with her but instead stuck her in a dumb blonde character that made it seem as though this was Carpenter’s first ever role in anything. Stig… there were never any scenes indicating why or how he’d go from dork to pompous social climber. Foreshadowing is key to believability. 
I think either the director, Nzingha Stewart, or screenwriter, Sam Wolfson, wanted to make Jodi and Dunkleman somewhat similar to Andie and Duckie from “Pretty in Pink,” and they succeeded. Dunkleman is the devoted best friend pining for the girl that doesn’t fit in — a Duckie straight out of John Hughes’ mind — except in this iteration of the plot she doesn’t run after Andrew McCarthy but into Jon Cryer’s lips.
The plot itself was so shallow perhaps because the characters lack depth themselves. I think the focus on bullying resulting in body dysmorphia was treated too lightly — and that’s okay because this is a rom-com — but bullying and body dysmorphia aren’t light topics. It just wasn’t combined and implemented well, resulting in this watch-once-and-never-again guilty pleasure.
The main problem with this film is that it completely missed the opportunity to shed light on real problems affecting tall girls — growing pains, too-small spaces, low ceilings, ill-fitting clothes like dresses that fit like shirts, needing to order everything online and most importantly, us short girls shamelessly stealing all the six-feet-tall men. Emphasis on shamelessly. 
However, these problems are banal and nothing more than inconveniences. Being tall means you have so many opportunities that are denied to us short girls. I always wanted to be a model, but I stopped growing at five-foot-two. Granted, I don’t have the confidence, but more importantly, no designer will have the short legs of a smurf like me walk the runways of Paris Fashion Week.
Tall girls can model haute couture; they have a clear, undisputable advantage when playing sports like volleyball and basketball, and long legs are favored when it comes to choosing a prima ballerina. This is evident when Jodi walks into homecoming in a suit looking like she just stepped off Ralph Lauren’s catwalk at New York Fashion Week. 
I’m not saying being tall is better than being short — I love being little, fitting into small spaces, always winning at Limbo and having every guy tower over me — because tall girls have issues too. But tall girls, and people in general, have never known the struggle of climbing into a shelf at the grocery store so you can get your favorite cereal or walking around to find someone tall to reach for you because, even when you climbed the shelf, you still couldn’t reach. 
There are so many issues with this film, but I guess watch it anyway if you’re bored. It’s better than doing whatever it is you’re actually supposed to be doing instead of watching Netflix.