From Ferris Bueller to Licence To Drive, all you need to make this type of movie is the kids and a concept.

This time out, teen geek Matthew Kidman hopes to go from class president to US president as quickly as possible by studying real hard.

At home his life is even more uninteresting. Resigned to being a geek and hanging out with his fellow losers, Kidman is going down the road to, that's right, Geek City.

But Matt's life is turned around the day he meets his new and infeasibly sexy neighbour, Elisha Cuthbert's Danielle - yet the formula that John Hughes would have come up with for the story at this point is dispensed with in the first half an hour.

What happens from there is pleasantly surprising, largely thanks to Tim Olyphant's turn as Kelly - Danielle's scene-stealing producer and ex-boyfriend.

Yet while it succeeds in breaking the mould of a standard teen comedy by livening the story up with some humorous set pieces, the cheese factor is so high that the Dairylea sponsorship is more obvious than Fed Ex in Castaway.

Why is it that a moral message must be conveyed at every opportunity?

American Pie limited itself from overplaying the 'righteous card' on all three occasions, but here it threatens to snuff out the comedy, which is mostly dealt with by a very able supporting cast.

Matt's friends, most notably Chris Marquette as Eli, supply the film's best lines of a hit and miss script. Particularly in the closing stages when the film could easily have become farcical.

Cuthbert may wax lyrical about the depth of her first major role, though as talented as she is, it's her stunning looks that are on show here more so than any comedic talent.

Hirsch in the meantime finds himself playing the straight man to several different gifted comedy actors.

The schmaltz factor makes it difficult to see how anyone over 15 could buy into it, but the foul language and humour suggest anyone under 15 probably wouldn't be the target audience anyway.

When our hero is plied with Ecstasy, he is at his most entertaining, laid back and interesting.

Even the speech which he delivers in one of the film's 7 different endings becomes a lot more entertaining - earning him a round of applause.

Now there's a questionable message to send the kids: Ecstasy, the cure for all known geeks.

That naiveté, combined with stupidly fast-paced editing reeks of lazy filmmaking. Especially given that almost every scene requires a pop song to punctuate the emotion that the film should really be conveying on its own.

Despite the drugs issue, it's often cleverer than you'd expect but may be a little too morally astute to please the masses.

Richard Phippen