I’m even more enamoured of the remake of this than I am of the That Darn Cat! remake, so this was always going to be a hard sell for me, even despite the joy of two Hayley Mills being onscreen for most of the film’s 2 hour duration.

One can’t really complain about the length here – the Lindsay Lohan remake of this was almost the exact same length. And it isn’t just a case of the more recent movie having the luxury of computers to graft the star’s dual performance together better on screen. Nancy Meyers’ version simply fixed some really glaring flaws at the core of this original production. The two Hayleys here come respectively from California and Boston, as opposed to the two Lindsays which were from California and London (Lindsay doing the accent thing perfectly). Where’s the sense in that? As I’ve already written in reviews of her other movies, Mills really can’t do the accents, though god knows she tries. Having both her characters here pretty much talk the same (there’s some business about the pronunciation of “aren’t”, “shan’t” and “can’t” which only serves to draw out the problem), a whole layer of fun is stripped away. The two characters are simply too alike.

It has to be said, they do a good job of creating the illusion of two Hayleys through body doubles etc, but it really can’t compare to what they did in 1998. I love Hayley Mills, but I love Lindsay Lohan too and I had a feeling that here I’d merely be writing that I love the ‘98 version more because Lindsay was simply cuter there than Hayley is here. Which is true But, really, I’m sorry but in this case everything is better in the remake. Everything. Though this is still a lot of fun.

My first instinct is to not bother saying the first thing that comes into my head about this one – a fake reality show, are you kidding me? Like as if I was expecting some kind of scathing satire on modern mass media culture from the Olsen Twins. Then I realised, no, the criticism still kind of stands. No, of course I don’t expect high art from the Olsen Twins, I’m not dumb. But y’know, considering reality shows are the ultimate fakery to begin with, I don’t care who is involved, a movie that is basically nothing more than a 90 minute fake reality show is still a monumentally insulting waste of time and resources – behind the camera, in front of the camera, and in front of the TV screen. I’d say, oh well, the twins are cute and the soundtrack’s pretty good, but they don’t begin to make up for the awfulness here. Do yourself a big favour and get Series 7 – The Contenders instead. It’s not perfect, but at least it tries.

Addendum: I wrote this before the movie finished, twasn’t particularly hard to see where it was going. But I just wanted to mention the actress Sera Bastian, who wasn’t at all bad compared to everyone else in the abominable display.

Another kind of pointless Olsen Twins movie, but of course they’re getting hormonal here so there’s the Hot Guy^TM element. It’s set in Australia and you get the worst assault of terrible stereotype humour (four girls, count ‘em, called Sheila …) There’s a couple of fleeting laughs (“Why is everybody showing up all of a sudden?” “Hello? Big finale?”), but again, I’d feel a little wrong filling kids’ heads with this kind of thing.

“Do you know on Halloween, goblins roam the land?” Well at least they admit what they look like in this one This movie really has no point whatsoever, the acting is terrible, terrible midi sound module score, you know the deal. I’d feel wrong letting children watch this crap. I think this is probably the worst Olsen Twins I’ve seen so far.

I think my brain may have finally been warped by the Olsen Twins, ‘cos I started out hating this movie but somehow by the end it had won me over. It has a different story than the usual Olsen Twins movie, but it’s still really all about how tough it is to be a girl, lol. I have so many bad things to say about the movie, like how I’d laugh my ass off if it took longer than a day to shoot the whole thing, etc, but I just don’t want to be mean. There’s a really really cute moment at the end when Ashley (or Mary-Kate… who knows?) gets lifted up by the guy she has a crush on after aceing a dive at the swim contest thing, the look on her face is priceless.

This movie must surely be breaking the law somehow given there seems to be no credit to the creators of The Parent Trap, lol. It is absolutely and truly the exact same plot. There are people on the IMDb message boards saying this isn’t so, pointing out that in It Takes Two, the girls are identical strangers, not identical sisters... wow, what a difference…

Kirsty Alley and Steve Guttenberg make a surprisingly cute screen couple, and there are some cute moments, I guess, but give me either Parent Trap anytime while I’ll probably never watch this again. And is it just me or were the Olsen Twins, like, really ugly at this age, lol? They look like gremlins or goblins or something.

There’s a lot about this Olsen Twins movie that makes it better than most, though not quite as polished as New York Minute. Again, the story is very similar, though there does seem to be more reason for their visit to London than rich parents who just want them out of the way: this time it’s a school trip, a model United Nations conference. The main Cute Guy^TM is played by Jesse Spencer, who I instantly recognised from somewhere – he looks a lot like Ryan Philippe, in fact – and a quick look at the IMDb shows he used to play Billy in Neighbours, and was the British rock singer in Uptown Girls. Though his British accent, like all the accents, attitudes, etc in this movie, is highly stylised (this London is the Movie London where everyone either speaks Posh or Cockney, where everyone drinks tea, and nobody in their right mind calls the bathroom anything but “the loo”...), he’s actually a pretty good actor and he makes that tough aspect of all Olsen Twins movies a little easier to sit through.

Also very cool is a small subplot with the characters dubbed “the third wheels” – the minor characters making up the Twins’ school team – and a cute little romance that develops between two of them. They sort of reminded me of Lindsay Lohan’s brilliant friends in Mean Girls. There’s also a very funny scene towards the end that you would expect must have been done before in a more respectable romantic comedy: one Twin is expecting to meet the Cute Guy^TM in front of Buckingham Palace; while standing next to one of the guards she mutters to herself about his not showing, and then walks away; later, the Cute Guy^TM appears next to the same guard, “I know you can’t talk… but did you see this girl…?” and the guard suddenly sharply turns his head with this urgent look in his eyes. The movie has a great soundtrack, too. Not bad at all.

While I found this not nearly as bad as Holiday in the Sun, that might just my personal reaction to it being set in beautiful Paris whereas Holiday was in a cheesy phony beach resort. The storyline is nearly exactly the same, with the Twins latching onto the first Cute Guys that come along (“I can’t understand what he’s saying,” “Duh! Who cares?” and I thought men were supposed to have one-track minds lol… there’s hope though: this movie ends with the Twins shock-horror forgoing the other Cute Guys – yes they have one in every continent, you know – they left back at highschool to do homework instead!) and ditching their careless carer to discover “the real Paris” (uh-oh).

It does have some really cute moments though – even the CGI Louvre scene. The background cast are actually very good, the chef and butler of the Twins’ grandfather (who happens to be the US Ambassador to Paris here), and I loved the character of Jeremy, who chaperones the girls around the city (or is supposed to) while grandpa is busy – the storyline of the girls matchmaking him and a supermodel and waking him up to be more pro-active with his ideas in front of his boss, while for obvious reasons very simple and kid-friendly, is welcome relief from the awful story with the two braindead French guys. Outtakes play through the end credits as usual and they’re, as usual, more fun than the movie itself.