Shane West, the young co-star of ABC-TV’s new dramatic hit “Once and Again,” makes his lead feature debut in the new teen romantic comedy “Whatever It Takes.” He plays Ryan Woodman, a high school senior who, in a plot reminiscent of “Cyrano de Bergerac,” helps campus jock Chris (James Franco) get a date with his best friend Maggie (Marla Sokoloff) in return for Chris’ help in setting him up with the girl of his dreams, luscious Ashley (Jodi Lyn O’Okeefe). The story may suggest lots of other previous pictures in the same genre, but in a recent Dallas interview West said he had brought a bit of personal history to what might be dismissed as a formula role.
“From sixth to tenth grade,” West said, “I was very much like Ryan. I had a couple of friends, and I would always dream about being with the most attractive girl in the school, and my world was comic books and professional wrestling. I was very shy.” Things changed only at the end of junior high. “As a senior at the end of tenth grade, I finally started weariung looser clothes and let my hair go,” West recalled. “And a senior girl got a crush on me. All she did was think I was cute, but–how ironic high school can be–it spread all over, and then all of a sudden I was thrown into the popular crowd, whether I wanted to be or not. So it was kind of similar to the movie.”
But also like Ryan–and one’s hardly spoiling the end of the picture by writing this–West realized that his real friends were his old friends, not the “popular people” who gravitated toward him for a while. “Whatever It Takes” isn’t West’s first film–he had a small part in Barry Levenson’s “Liberty Heights”–but it does represent an important stage in his career’s upward spiral. Born in Baton Rouge, the actor recalled that it wasn’t until fairly late that he began acting, largely as a result of seeing friends do it. “I was really trying to find out something to do with my life,” he said. “I was sixteen years old. So I got into it [acting] kind of as ‘something to do.’ But I wanted to succeed at it. And it took me two-and-a-half years to get a single part–not even a commercial. And so it was very tough, kind of depressing. But it made me more interested in the business, made me want to succeed even more, to prove the critics wrong. So finally it became a career choice.” 
West’s big break came in a Los Angeles stage production of “The Cider House Rules,” in which he played Angel for some five months. There were also roles on such TV series as “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “Sliders,” and “Picket Fences.” Finally he was cast in the pilot of “Once and Again,” but before the show was picked up, the chance to make “Whatever It Takes” offered itself.
“It was eight weeks of crazy, non-stop humor,” West said of the film’s shoot. “So how coul you not like it? The whole ‘Whatever It Takes’ experience was really kind of a dream. I’d never been a lead in anything.” And the fact that Sokoloff (or TV’s “The Practice’), already a friend, secured the distaff lead, while his own roommate Aaron Paul
was eventually cast as Ryan’s flaky best buddy, was an added bonus. “It was a dream come true.” While the film was shooting, “Once and Again” was picked up for the ABC schedule, and two days after finishing “Whatever It Takes,” West began work on the season’s episodes. The series has thrived first on Tuesday and then Monday nights, and the young star says, “I’m very thankful to be in the show.”
But a successful series won’t stop West from making more movies–though not, he thinks, a raft of teen comedies. “It’s not something I really want to do,” he explained. “When you’re thinking more career-wise, you can’t keep doing the same thing. People will like you, and they’ll remember you, but they’ll remember you for about three years, and then you may have come and gone…. So right now I’m looking for sort of edgier roles and some more offbeat movies.” 
So while adolescent girls can enjoy Shane West in “Whatever It Takes” for the moment, we can expect to see him next on the big screen in one or more of the smaller, independent films that he’s currently eyeing to shoot during the series hiatus which begins in April. And although “Once and Again” hasn’t yet been officially picked up by the network for next year, its critical and ratings success suggests that viewers will continue to be able to watch him on the tube, too.

Grade: C

Back in the halcyon days of black-and-white television, the
original “Twilight Zone” offered a script by Rod Serling titled
“And When the Sky Was Opened.” Based on a story by Richard
Matheson, it concerned three astronauts (Rod Taylor, Charles
Aidman and Jim Hutton) who returned to earth after their mission
had temporarily disappeared in space. In the course of
the show it became clear that their survival had been a
mistake in the fabric of destiny, and one by one they vanished
into oblivion, and the world’s recognition of their return
faded.

By “TZ” standards it wasn’t an outstanding episode, but “And
When the Sky Opened” is still preferable to the teen variant of
it assembled by “X-Files” veterans Glen Morgan and James Wong
in “Final Destination.” The premise–a pretty good one,
actually–is that when seven people, six students and a
teacher, depart a doomed airliner minutes before its departure
because of the horrifying premonition of a crash one of them
experiences, their escape of the calamity sets into motion the
force of fate, which systematically begins removing each of
them through some ghastly “accident.” The fashioners of the
piece thus achieve the goal of the modern generation of
slasher movies–arranging a succession of elaborate death
sequences for mostly young, and usually quite photogenic,
victims–without having to resort to the cliche of devising
some Freddy Kruger-like character to do the actual dirty work.

The problem that becomes apparent, as the movie unspools, is
that having once set up the premise, the makers have pretty
much shot their wad. The first twenty minutes of the flick,
in which nervous high-schooler Alex Browning (Devon Sawa) has
his precognition and runs screaming from the plane with his
six compatriots in pursuit, are nicely done, ominously building
a mood of dread that’s really quite effective (abetted by an
atmospheric if derivative score by Shirley Walker); and the
deaths which follow are cleverly choreographed, with two of
them having a kind of Rube Goldberg complexity and the third
the giddily shocking suddenness of the best moment of “Meet Joe
Black.” But as the explanatory mechanism of the plot kicks in,
things grow increasingly tiresome. We’re treated to a totally
extraneous explication of the “pattern of fate” our survivors
have abridged by a ghoulish undertaker (a cameo by Tony Todd,
recited in his resonant, sepulchral tones)–a scene that lapses
into dull self-parody. Underdeveloped secondary characters
(Kerr Smith as loudmouth bully Carter Horton, Seann William
Scott as geeky Billy Hitchcock) come to the fore, only to
become more and more irritating as their screen time expands. A
sequence with Alex in an isolated cabin, which promises to
develop into something akin to a riff on “The Evil Dead”
formula, simply fizzles. And then we’re forced to sit through
an elaborate finale in which the geography of affairs and the
precise nature of the threat are never made sufficiently clear,
as well as the obligatory epilogue-with-a-twist, which in the
present instance is very elaborate but more than a trifle
confusing.

In all of this one comes to miss the simplicity and economy of
the old “Twilight Zone” episode, which didn’t hesitate to close
on what was essentially a grim, downbeat note. Here, as so
frequently happens nowadays, the makers feel the necessity of
hedging their bets at the end so as not to be too bleak (and,
one might add, to leave room for a sequel if one seems
warranted). You also begin to worry about the condition of
poor Mr. Sawa, who has had to go through such strenuous paces
in last year’s “Idle Hands” and now this, that he seems to have
reached a point of absolute exhaustion. (It also can’t be
helpful to the lad’s leading-boy persona to be type-cast as a
sort of teenaged Bruce Campbell.)

But despite its failings, the picture does manage, especially
in its earlier stages, to be more stylish, inventive, and
(especially in its elaborate death sequences) imaginative than
most of the (admittedly wretched) examples of its genre. (For
this one must credit primrily Morgan and Wong, along with
cinematographer Robert McLachlan, who also worked with the
duo on the TV series “Millennium.”)

Still, it must be admitted that after its promising liftoff,
“Final Destination” loses altitude fairly quickly and
ultimately doesn’t get very far.