Shakespeare's transsexual play Twelfth Night is about a woman dressed as a man, who falls for a man who's already in love with another woman, while she in turn falls in love with the woman who she believes to be a man. It makes Francois Truffaut's film about a menage a trois, Jules et Jim, look like an advertisement for Milk Tray. It's also the latest Shakespeare drama to be transplanted into a teen highschool movie . . . a genre that has run out of surprises with its now automated and predictable checklist of plot outcomes: Press 1 for Sensitive Type gets the Beautiful Girl; Press 2 for Bullying Jock gets public humiliation; Press 3 for Ugly Duckling becomes Prom Queen. Usually, it centres around a crunch high-school football game.

So far, so much the same for She's The Man. But the first twist is that the sensitive type is actually a girl dressed as a boy (played by the talented Amanda Bynes). And she wants to play soccer as much as the jocks. Bynes, however, has another trick up her sleeve. It involves being very funny and watchable, while the screenwriters dump more and more cliched manure into the story. What starts out vaguely as Shakespeare ends up as every teen/sports movie you've ever seen. Bynes can barely keep her head above the muck and the ending really stinks. As for old Shakes, there's not a whiff of him left by the third act.

Bynes plays Viola Johnson, the twin of Sebastian, and centre-forward on the school's girls' soccer team. He's a wannabe rock star and sneaks off to London with his band for two weeks to break into the music scene. When her school cuts the girls' soccer, and won't let her try for the boys' team, she enrols at Sebastian's new school . . . as Sebastian . . . with the plan of getting on the soccer team and playing against her own school.

She arrives at Illyria Prep School (that name came from Shakespeare) with a short wig, sideburns, and a deep voice which on occasion she forgets to control. Still, with her boobs strapped tightly to her chest, and her wide, boyish face, nobody notices. She shares a dorm with hunky but sensitive Duke Orsino (a rather dull Channing Tatum). He's after stunner Olivia (Laura Ransey), and she's after, well, nobody, until she meets the new, sweet Sebastian. And by then, Sebastian (aka Viola) has fallen for Duke. The setup is perfect and mistaken identity snowballs into romantic catastrophe while Bynes makes the most of the pratfalls.

A pack of tampons fall out of her football boots, much to the amazment of Duke. "You don't use them for nose bleeds?" she says, and Duke soon takes up the habit. During football practice, (Vinnie Jones plays himself as the nasty coach) she forgets to respond when a football hits her in the groin.

"It burns!" she finally squawks, and she has to think on her feet to avoid showering with the boys. Bynes is a winning comedic presence and gives the film a refreshing, feminine sensibility. The skits are good-humoured and there's not a single fart joke. But by the time the real Sebastian returns to school, sending the characters into tizzy of confusion, the film has already run out of surprises, lost in its predictability.