Some teen movies are so bad they are great—epics of historical grandeur like She’s All That or Bring It On deserve a place in any respectable time capsule—First Daughter is not one of these. It’s just bad.

Katie Holmes stars as Samantha Mackenzie, the daughter of the president who yearns for a normal life, away from the prying eyes of the press and secret service. If this plot seems eerily like this past spring’s Mandy Moore dud Chasing Liberty, it’s because it is exactly the same. Literally.

Like a month-old Krispy Kreme doughnut, the sweetness of this coming-of-age film is nauseating from the first bite: Sam and President Dad (Michael Keaton) are introduced via an encounter over a massive, middle-of-the-night slice of chocolate cake and waltzing rendezvous. The scene evokes your typical father/daughter interaction, especially those whose relationships have slightly Elektra-shaded overtones.

Sam, who dresses like a still curly-haired Chelsea Clinton, leaves the next morning for a Berkeley-esque college, where she realizes quickly her dream of normalcy—which entails, in her immortal words, “cruising around in a Volkswagen Beetle with a cooler in the passenger seat holding a bologna sandwich and a beer”— will be hard to achieve.

Part of the difficulty are the two massive Secret Service bodyguards that her two bodyguards are always lurking around protecting Sam. Although one is almost constantly mute—might he possibly end the movie saying something incredibly wise?—codename “Charm Bracelet” resents the intrusive protection.

Luckily, she meets and falls for her older hunky resident advisor, James (all-American boy-next-door Mark Blucas, whose future as a WB star is all but guaranteed), because he makes her feel, well, ordinary in that “Hey I’m just another girl trying my best to sketchily hit on the nearest older male authority figure” way.

In this fairy-tale world, Sam gets a little wild as she celebrates her new freedom with James by eating cotton candy in an amusement park unchaperoned, sliding down a waterslide with her clothes on and spending a date in a rowboat, holding a pink parasol as he holds a small fishing rod. There is one particularly moving scene where Sam eats a slice of pizza and, as the grease slides down her throat, remarks that it “tastes like freedom”—at which point I teared up, remembering my own first taste of delicious grease freedom.

In truth there are some phenomenal moments in the spirit of the great teen movies of yore—a wasted Sam table dancing at a pimps and hos party while dressed as Pamela Anderson, a bizarrely homoerotic fraternity striptease involving the American flag, and some unwholesome shots of Katie Holmes’s famed cleavage—but sadly these scenes are too infrequent and not nearly ridiculous enough to carry the audience through Sam’s tedious series of trials and tribulations.

Yes, people take her picture, the boy she likes hasn’t kissed her yet and her ethnically ambiguous slut of a roommate (who accentlessly claims to hail from Alabama) draws on her family portrait. In the words of Vanessa Kerry: “There are pictures of my breasts all over the internet!”

Ultimately, First Daughter takes itself too seriously, is not compelling enough to be serious and most tragically does not have one choreographed dance number to redeem it. Watching Holmes in this utterly shallow role, I feel secondhand embarrassment reminiscent of Jenna and Babs’ stand-up at the Republican National Convention. (EMK)

The Forgotten

What if a normal and recognizable woman suddenly went to war with her world, trapped by memories that conflicted with what the people she trusted would have her believe, fighting for the truth as she felt it in her core, struggling to prove that her son was more than just a figment of post-miscarriage depression? This, the trailer for The Forgotten, splashed across the screen to intrigue and thrill me as I waited to be entertained by the indie music and muted palette of Garden State last month. That scene where the protagonist storms into Ash’s study and pulls off the wallpaper, revealing the drawings of his disappeared daughter, may be one of the most brilliantly constructed seat-fillers I’ve ever witnessed, and most of the friends I’ve asked would agree.

Beyond its potential for fun, it had the makings of an intelligent paranoid thriller. It could reflect our times and connect with the uncertainty so many of us feel about what’s really going on in our world. The key was Julianne Moore’s desperate call for empathy, for believers: I wanted to believe. On this evidence alone, I was willing. But, as is too often the case in this era, it was a sleazy bait and switch scheme—I found nothing spectacular or terrifying in The Forgotten, only government agents scrambling to hide a conspiracy and scrambled plot lines trying to hide a lack of creativity. My faith was clearly unfounded.

It seemed the film would be about the intricacies of the human mind, the ways in which memory can edit itself to protect us, how it can warp our perception of our lives to the extent that what is true for one person is considered delusional by those around her. The Forgotten teased me with echoes of Memento and The Sixth Sense and stirrings of Conspiracy Theory, with all the necessary ingredients for a philosophically sound, psychologically wrenching treatment of the division between reality and our experience of it. Still, although it begins on the right path, it quickly took the one most traveled by: it devolved into the kind of typical thriller I never would have wasted an hour and a half of my own life watching.

Such a failure occurred despite the guarantee a seemingly competent cast should offer. Although Moore can be shrill and fragile in some films, her Telly Paretta is a likeable everywoman. Gary Sinise, as Telly’s therapist, is appropriately authoritarian, with a dose of compassion and an otherworldly magnetism, while her husband, ER’s Anthony Edwards, with the benefit of limited screen time, appears to be phoning in his support from another planet. Dominic West plays Ash Correll, the father of another “forgotten” child and Telly’s partner in revealing conspiracy, with self-confidence in his bearing and sufficient limits on his emotional pull.