Duff fails in fairy tale flop

I honestly walked into "A Cinderella Story" with a secret hope that Hilary Duff might surprise me. After all, I had gone to "Mean Girls" expecting to hate Lindsay Lohan (Hilary's teenybopper arch nemesis), and it ended up a pleasant surprise. What was stopping "A Cinderella Story" from being the same way?\nUnfortunately, this so-called "new twist" on the story of Cinderella was seriously lacking. The story centers around Sam, played obnoxiously by Duff, a young girl who is forced, after her father's death, to live with her evil stepmother, Fiona (played delightfully by the talented Jennifer Coolidge, of "Stifler's Mom" fame). Sam is a sweet but poor, misunderstood and unpopular young girl at her high school. I'm sorry, but the only place someone who looks and acts like Duff would be unpopular is in the Twilight Zone. She's adorable, and despite the fact that the movie plays up her poverty (due to her evil stepmom), she drives a classic Mustang, wears designer jeans and carries her nice cell phone around everywhere. Poor and unpopular? Not anywhere in this universe!\nSo, downtrodden Sam starts up a little Internet romance with a guy from her school, who turns out to be (big surprise!) the quarterback of the football team. (Could they ever make the hero of a story the band drum major or the president of the chess club?) Sam and Austin don't know who the other person is on the 'Net, but they really understand each other. He writes her bad, sappy poetry; she flirts back in her wide-eyed, innocent way. Eventually, they decide to meet at 11 p.m. in the center of the dance floor at the big homecoming dance. This is a costumed affair, so Sam naturally wears a beautiful white dress and dons a mask. Austin, the brain-dead lover, can't tell who it is, of course, and when Sam leaves quickly to get back before her stepmother discovers that she's gone, she drops her cell phone.\nRather than just calling some numbers in the phone and finding out who's phone he has, Austin decides to put posters up all over the school, which attract the attention of the local girls. They all claim to be Austin's mystery girl, while Sam hides out. Gee, I wonder whether hot jock Austin will discover that his "true love" is actually the girl that supposedly no one likes! And will he accept her for who she is? It's not exactly the cliffhanger of the century.\nThis movie was dull and positively indistinguishable from almost every other crappy teen romance that's been made in the past 10 years. The plot was highly predictable, the acting was terrible and all-in-all, the movie was unbearable.