El amor no cuesta nada

Do you remember the 80's? Did you collect Garbage Pail Kids while the NKOTB-buttoned girls played Care Bears and Kid Sister?

If you did, then there's a chance you had to suffer through quite a few 80's films.. Or rather, it felt like you were being made to suffer, way back when.

We're a little older now, maybe more mature and hopefully a little more open to rediscovering the 80's.

"Can't Buy Me Love" is an 80's masterpiece I still enjoy today. Dempsey's nasal sonnets, his little brother's hustles and their parents' 30-something attitude to everything are classic. Ranked up there with "Weird Science", "Real Genius" and "Raising Arizona", the original tested the times while paving new ground.

"Love Don't Cost A Thing" is a paycheck for the producers whose idea of a good time must be making K-Mart xerox copies of ideas they wished they had first.

If they have a Triple-Gold Globe Awards for the likes of Master P and Snoop's acting quality, I'll make sure to steal a cell phone and call the 900 number that gives your ghetto fabulous trash 5 Bling-Blings and two slaps across your face on GP, Uuuugh.

This 'Movie' is hard to flush, let alone swallow.

but it did keep me mildly entertained. A nerd high schooler, Alvin, comes up with the idea of fixing the hotest girl, Paris, in school's car in exchange for her to hang with him for 2 weeks. So, he becomes popular and starts blowing off his old nerd friends. You've seen this plot a thousand times. It had a few humorous moments with Alvins' dad who just wants his son to "score" and stop being a nerd. And Alvins' sister has some funny lines about why he's acting strange. It was a little disappointing to see Alvin treat Paris like crap then of course she realizes she has the hots for him.

One big complaint was that most of the high school kids in this movie looked like they were in there mid-30s, especially Alvin's nerd friends.

FINAL VERDICT: I think it is aimed for a teenage audience, and if you are over 22, I don't recommend it.

Prior to watching this, I had not seen "Can't Buy Me Love". This is one of those movies that came out while I was still delivering papers, and I didn't see it because I read horrible reviews for it in the paper. I decided to finally watch it, and while the reviews were way too harsh, this is not a great romantic comedy, and it falls flat largely because of Nick Cannons over-the-top and somehow, still wooden at the same time performance. This actually could have been a pretty fun movie with a different leading man. Christina Milian does a good job, and you cannot fault her. It would also help if Cannon and Milian had more onscreen time together, as it is a bit limited. They just never build a really strong connection, and I'm not entirely sure why Milian would be interested in him for real. I actually think it would have been a better movie if Kenan Thompson was the lead, or hell, Kal Penn, and Cannon was one of the sidekicks, he just cannot handle this role at all. He tries, and sometimes it is fun, but it is wildly inconsistent.

Steve Harvey is over-the-top cringe, I really really think someone else should have played his dad. Every scene he is in is painful to watch, his expressions, his vocal tone, everything feels grossly out of place, and he is normally pretty funny.

The movie is filled with some great hip hop and rap music from the early 2000's, and is a blast from the past, the dancing, the clothes, etc. I do love that Alvin is a hardworking intelligent entrepreneur, but again his character is OTT exaggerated by cannon, he comes across less cool than Urkel actually. He does not feel like a real person, but a bizarre caricature.

If you're a teen though, you might still enjoy it, and I did enjoy it at times, even though I am well out of my teens, but I feel as thought this could have been a really good movie, and it was, instead a missed opportunity.

Unlike the original movie from 1987 "can't buy me love", "Love doesn't cost a thing" is too slow a little bit boring, most of the characters are annoying and the movie as a whole is just not fun. They try a little bit too hard to be cool and updated but as the girl said in the movie "Urkel has become gangster" it's just not it. the idea was good, re-make the classic and the beloved film of the 80's in the millennium version, but we've seen too many teen movies that look and sounds just like this, and they are better. If you like Christina Milian you'll LOVE her in this movie, because she is so amazing in this role, but that's the only good thing i have to say about this movie.

Ima start by saying i got a guilty pleasure of watching this film just cause it was one of the teen films i grew up watching, i actually took the time to watch the original film starring Patrick Dempsey and i agree the original is so much better, ok guys here's the deal, don't hate too much on the film, it has some good moments in the film, i do enjoy Christina Milian's role but I felt Nick Cannon's role, he just ended up pushing his friends away and having his ego there 90 percent of the time, his character didn't do much and really didn't interact with Milian's character most of the film, i enjoyed the film for what it was, a mindless, dumb, and fun film to see