'John Tucker Must Die' (PG-13)(out of four)

Given that it's July, I spent more than a few moments during a recent screening of "John Tucker Must Die" daydreaming about better days, my mind drifting back to my days at summer camp, years before this dreadful film was even a spark in someone's mind.

There, we played a game designed to teach us about first, and false, impressions. Each person would tape an index card to their forehead, and each card would saddle the person with a label, such as "preppy," "shallow," "mean," "attractive," etc.

Experiencing "John Tucker Must Die," which is about as subtle a story as it is a title, is like reliving that superficial summer game. One by one, faces appear on the screen, and announce who they are, sometimes through their own clumsy mannerisms and other times through their juvenile dialogue with other similarly shallow characters.

Call me old-fashioned, but I enjoy going to the movies to witness a story unfold before me -- to suspend my disbelief as I become, at the very least, interested and, ideally, immersed in a fictional world in which I'm surprised, delighted, horrified or moved.

But there is a growing segment of what I call "blockbuster cinema," which really has no interest in suspending a viewer's disbelief. There's no coaxing or convincing, no act of creation. They are films that merely flash images, and blare sounds, and tell us that this is the way it is; eat and be happy.

It's not an act of immersion; it's an exercise in dictation. Whereas most films entice me to write down my observations about certain characters or particular situations, "John Tucker," and other similar teenybopper "stories" make me feel like a stenographer. It would work just as well as an audio book.

The specifics of this film are thus:

Who: Three girls, all in love with one boy.

Where: High school.

Problem: Jealousy over a single boy.

Solution: Dupe the school's new girl to play cute with the boy, win his heart, and then squash it.

In the marketing rooms at Twentieth Century Fox, the two demos are clear: Girls 13-20, who will giggle along with the antics of their onscreen counterparts, and, of course, boys 13-20, who will go because the girls they are dating -- or hope to date -- want to see it.

Yet what's shocking about "John Tucker Must Die" is how unapologetically the film goes about its obligatory formula. Just as one expects, the film's divided into segments that build into musical montages. There's a segment detailing each girl -- all cheerleaders -- then one about their anger over being double-crossed by hunky John Tucker (Jesse Matcalfe), their plotting against the boy, their recruiting the new girl, and then sending her out time after time in hopes of embarrassing Tucker.

The most interesting twist involves Tucker -- captain of the basketball team - being forced to wear a thong, and then his creativity in convincing the rest of the team to don them as well.

But given the shallowness of the antics, it's difficult to care much about the back-and-forth, and as a result all we're left with is a movie about four vindictive girls and a shallow guy. No one's particularly nice, or funny, or friendly. It's a cynical movie about cynical people doing cynical things.

Some people tell me they get irritated at movies that dare to have a hint of unease. We want escapism, they say, not reality.

Well, they should add a new list to their objections: awful characters in dumb movies. If we're going to abandon any sense of storytelling or intelligence, couldn't we at the very least do it with cheerful cardboard cutouts? Nice people can be dumb, too.