Rowena’s review of The DUFF, the Movie.

Bianca is a content high school senior whose world is shattered when she learns the student body knows her as ‘The DUFF’ (Designated Ugly Fat Friend) to her prettier, more popular friends. Now, despite the words of caution from her favorite teacher, she puts aside the potential distraction of her crush, Toby, and enlists Wesley, a slick but charming jock, to help reinvent herself. To save her senior year from turning into a total disaster, Bianca must find the confidence to overthrow the school’s ruthless label maker Madison and remind everyone that no matter what people look or act like, we are all someone’s DUFF.

After discussing movie reviews with Holly, we decided that we’re going to start reviewing the books that were turned into movies here on Book Binge and this is the very first movie review that I’m going to write.

Over the weekend I took my niece Makaela out for her birthday and she wanted to see this so I rallied up the troops and we made the 4:40 showing at our local theater. I thought the theater would be a lot more crowded than it was and that surprised me because the other teeny bopper books turned movies had bigger crowds than this movie did.

I read the book before watching the movie so I already knew that the movie was going to be different (you can tell from the movie trailer just how different the book was from the movie) so I wasn’t expecting to like the movie as much as I did the book but I did.

Bianca has two gorgeous and popular best friends in Jess and Casey. They’re into fashion and they’re hot stuff but they love Bianca so she never really paid much attention to how much more gorgeous they are than she is until her next door neighbor, Wesley Rush calls her their D.U.F.F.

DUFF stands for Designated Ugly Fat Friend and Bianca isn’t at all happy that Wes has enlightened her on her DUFF status. This status bothers her so much that she obsesses over it and she goes through the five stages of grief throughout the movie. You know, denial and sadness and anger and well, you get the idea. The only way that she thinks she could get over her obsession is to reinvent herself and who does she go to for help?

Wesley Rush, of course.

Wesley needs help passing science so they agree on a swap (after Bianca asks in Monster voice, ha!) of services and the movie really takes off.

I really enjoyed the movie. I thought it was cute and fun and every single kid that I took to see this movie agreed with me. They loved it. They thought it was hilarious and immediately after the movie, they were trying to figure out who the DUFFs were in their circle of friends. They all wanted to be the DUFFs too, which I thought was funny.

The casting of the characters was pretty great, IMO. I adored Robbie Amell as Wesley Rush (and so did every single girl that went to see the movie with me) and I thought that Mae Whitman was a great Bianca. Madison was a new character (not from the book) and she was a great villain because I wanted to punch her every time she released a video that embarrassed Bianca and I wanted Bianca to punch her every ten minutes (at least). Ken Jeong and Romany Malco had me cracking up every time they came on screen and overall, it was just a fun movie.

My favorite scene in the movie was probably the scene where Bianca shows Wes her Think Rock. That whole scene had me cracking up because, well it’s a good scene. You’ll just have to take my word for it..until you watch the movie yourself. 🙂

I will definitely be getting this movie on DVD and I’ll probably watch this one every time it comes on cable.

Grade 4 out of 5

Movie Trailer

This movie was released by CBS Films. I bought my own ticket to see this movie in the theater with my kids.