Are you ready for a movie featuring military uniforms, early-2000s accessorizing, and “Sir” said more times than you can count? Oh, and it’s a DCOM (Disney Channel Original Movie, for those of you who spent your childhoods being sad in a cave). I know I sure am, so this week we’re watching Cadet Kelly!
The IMDb page for Cadet Kelly describes our heroine (Hilary Duff) as “the clumsiest, most clueless cadet to enter George Washington Military Academy,” and that sums up the first half of this movie pretty darn well. Kelly loved her artsy Montessori school in New York City, but when her mom gets remarried, off they move to the land of crisp creases and stiff salutes. If you say it’s a bit of a rough transition, I would probably give you an award for Understatement of the Year. Kelly immediately clashes with stick-in-the-mud Cadet Captain Stone (Christy Carlson Romano), and most of the movie is spent trying to figure out how to retain individuality and a sense of yourself in this rigid world where uniformity is held up as the ideal.
Isn’t that a great lesson? Cadet Kelly takes an idea that is almost painfully familiar to the kids watching this movie, and turns it into something fun and funny and just foreign enough to not be painfully on the nose. Thirteen year old me was trying to navigate fights with my friends, dealing with crushes, and looking nervously ahead to high school, all while trying to sort out my own personality and style and interests. It led to several very awkward years, which I don’t think I would repeat if you paid me.
Cadet Kelly dealt with all this same issues I was grappling with. She has to make new friends at a new school. She tries to impress a cute boy. She struggles to figure out where she fits in this new world of shined shoes and epaulets. And, perhaps my favorite part, this movie doesn’t make it look easy. So many “fabulous” characters in movies similar to this seem like they have their life together, like middle school isn’t guaranteed to be a hot mess – to use a term very popular in my middle school years.
Don’t you worry, though. Kelly is sometimes a very hot mess. Now, she still never gets a pimple or has a hair out of place, but I think the emotional turmoil more than makes up for that.
My goodness, I don’t miss middle school.
On a much less thoughtful and theme-based note, this movie stars a fifteen year old Hilary Duff, so basically it’s guaranteed to be good, right? Throw in Kim Possible and Ren Stevens herself (Christy Carlson Romano), and you’ve got yourself a Disney Channel classic.
Cadet Kelly is fun and thoughtful and instantly quotable. In other words, it’s a DCOM at its best. Highly recommended, for when you feel a bit nostalgic.
Image credits: IMDB, Giphy.com, Boolandreeve.tumblr.com