I’m one of those people who objects to a hell of a lot of things that are like the Olsen Twins in pop cultural terms (eg, American Idol, Big Brother, Paris Hilton, anything you can find in those magazines that seem to be made for illiterates, I guess), and yet I’ve never truly objected to the Olsen Twins. They’ve never got in my face like the other things, I guess. Maybe I’ve just been lucky, but I’ve never really seen them gracing talk shows every month, or even seen them on that many magazine covers. Generally, if I see the Olsen Twins, I’m expecting to see them. They’re on their fashion label, they’re in their doll section, they’re in their DVD section. They stick to where they’re meant to be found, and are generally inoffensive.

So, even if I was to hate this movie, it would not be for the reasons that nearly everybody else who hates this movie seem to give, which seems to boil down to a phrase that must have taken them years to assemble, “Olsen Twins [annoyed grunt] suck!”

But I don’t hate this movie. Not one bit. But, equally, let’s not make this about the Twins. It’s clear that this is not the usual Olsen Twins movie, and I think it’s only fair to look at the movie as just any old movie, and talk about it without any further mention of the stars.

From a great manic set of opening titles, this movie is basically a fairly old-fashioned chase across the city of New York when a couple of twins, each with their own agenda for the day, get waylaid by a Chinese piracy operation. Millions of dollars of pirated music are stored on a “chip” (okay, this part really is stupid, but go with it: they’d have been better leaving it as an unidentified Hitchcockian McGuffin…) that accidentally finds its way into one of the twins’ bags. The movie then follows three strands, with the Chinese trying to get their chip back, the girls trying to get to their planned events, and the girls trying to resolve their typical sibling differences. If that’s not enough, there’s a truancy officer (Eugene Levy, is he ever not funny?) on the heels of the “evil” twin, Roxy.

So it borrows from a bunch of movies for its plot, big deal, can anyone say Tarantino? So it gets most of its pace from dizzying MTV editing and pounding hits on the soundtrack, big deal! Personally, I enjoyed the ride of this movie. It keeps moving, which is more than can be said of many, many movies.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 3rd, 2004 at 7:22 am in 3 hearts, Movie Reviews and tagged as cuties, NYC, Olsen twins, twins. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.