Hilary Duff's latest film is straight as an arrow but as compelling as concrete

When it comes to the new Hilary Duff flick "Raise Your Voice," you have a pretty good idea early on the kind of wholesome tone this tale is going to take.

MOVIE REVIEW

RAISE YOUR VOICE

DIRECTOR: Sean McNamara

CAST: Hilary Duff, Oliver James, John Corbett

RUNNING TIME: 103 minutes

RATING: PG for thematic elements and language

WHERE: Alderwood 7, Cinema 17, Crossroads 8, East Valley 13, Factoria, Galaxy Tacoma 6, Galleria 11, Gateway 8, Issaquah 9, Marysville Cinema 14, Monroe 12, Mountlake 9, Pacific Place, Parkway Plaza 12, Redmond Town Center, South Hill Mall, Woodinville 12

GRADE: C-

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"Call me a dork, but I love choir practice," gushes Terri Fletcher (Duff), a perky teen living the clean life in Flagstaff, Ariz.

Much like the teens and tweens this movie is meant to appeal to, "Raise Your Voice" is an awkward and sometimes confused thing fraught with overwrought emotions and misguided ideals. And much like its main character, it is squeaky clean to the point of being one of those exasperating goody two-shoes.

Still though, it's a coherent-enough story, sure to appeal to parents who want to take their impressionable youngsters to a movie that's passably entertaining (if not terribly challenging) and to those who want to spend 90 minutes listening to overproduced Duff songs.

In this sanitized and overtly Christian-themed revisitation of "Fame" territory, Terri is a chaste high school singer living under the thumb of an overly protective and not particularly intelligent father (David Keith). Although she longs to attend a prestigious summer academy for the musically gifted, her domineering dad won't allow her to go because it's in the Gomorrah-spawned snake pit otherwise known as L.A.

But when Terri's loving bud of a brother (Jason Ritter) dies in a car accident, Terri's mother and aunt conspire to send the grieving girl to the academy. That is: They lie to dad and send the 16-year-old off to L.A. behind his back.

Thus begins Terri's journey -- a journey in which she finds her voice (both literally and figuratively), finds love and finds out that it's OK to lie to dear old dad as long as he's a wrong-headed stick-in-the-mud. The first two of these lessons makes for a good bit of storytelling. The latter one remains a real head-scratcher.

On the one hand, it's nice to see a teen star take the high road for a change. Duff has involved herself in a positive piece of filmmaking in which she radiates a sweetness that seems genuine -- something most of us can appreciate when confronted by some of her peers' ridiculous bad girl antics.

Still, Duff remains a truly mediocre actress who continues to come off surprisingly stiffly on screen for someone who's been performing since she was a pipsqueak. Her interactions with love-interest Jay (Oliver James), a Brit boy rocker, are as painfully rigid as much of the rest of her performance.

In the end, the film is both truly wholesome and wholly uninteresting.

Winda Benedetti is a Seattle-based freelance writer who can be reached at Goodgirlfriday@gmail.com.