The DUFF squanders a story worth telling

Popular high school quarterback Wesley (Robbie Amell) finds a beautiful person inside socially inept Bianca (Mae Whitman). In turn she discovers that his dumb jock exterior masks the soul of a true friend (and more). Sadly, the producers of The DUFF (rated PG-13 for crude and sexual material, some language, and teen partying) fail to see the light Wesley and Bianca stumble into.

Bianca learns that she is the “duff” (designated ugly fat friend) for her two attractive friends, Jess and Casey. Guys talk to Bianca only to get to Jess and Casey. Suddenly self-conscious of her frumpy nerdiness, she retreats from (unfriends, unfollows, and blocks on Tumblr) her high school classmates. Encouraged by her recently divorced, motivational speaker mother (whose dating advice to her daughter is, “Believe, retrieve, achieve—just don’t conceive”) to get back in the game, Bianca embarks on a journey of self-improvement, or so she thinks. She helps Wesley with chemistry homework in exchange for his tutorial in dressing and acting to be noticed.

At the heart of The DUFF is a tender love story, but from the opening scene, trashy talk and twerking trample tenderness. (For those of you blessedly and now, formerly, outside the know, twerking is—couched as much as possible in Seussian verse—dirty dance/in squatting stance.) S-bombs rain down, and lewdness litters almost every scene. The director didn’t have the eyes to see the locusts devouring the blossom. Like too many movies today, a story worth telling is not worth watching because how it’s told.

At the prom (of course), the mean girls who bullied Bianca are denounced in a rapid-fire sermonette (“Be the best weirdo you can be … everyone is somebody’s duff”), but it’s too little too late. Wesley finds a jewel in Bianca, but The DUFF trades a gem for paste.