Eric Michael Stone
New Best Friend Review
Bad
A boring, unfocused twist on the dangerous-in-crowd B-movie archetype, "New Best Friend" stars innocent yet mysterious Mia Kirshner ("Exotica," "Not Another Teen Movie") as an insecure outcast at a tony North Carolina college who falls into a drug-induced coma a few weeks after falling in with the campus snob squad of well-heeled sexpots.
It seems party girls Meredith Monroe ("Dawson's Creek"), Dominique Swain ("Lolita") and Rachel True ("The Craft") took dowdy, pouty Kirshner under their collective wing and gave her a makeover that changed her life. Freed from her frumpy sweaters and bed-head hair, the girl suddenly lost interest in schoolwork and her one-scene nobody of a best friend. Now she's all about lip gloss, snug little spaghetti-strapped tank tops (braless, naturally) and inexplicably confident flirtations with the Big Man On Campus (Scott Bairstow), who didn't even know she was alive a few scenes earlier when he walked by in studly, teen-movie slow motion.
Now that she's laid up in a hospital bed, her barfly mother is screaming how the popularity triad must have done something to her, and the small town's temporary sheriff (the talented but badly miscast Taye Diggs) is conducting an investigation that the school's snooty dean wants kept quiet.
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