Siena Agudong | Through the Shattered Lens

Since we had a few hours to kill before the Cowboys game started, Lisa and I decided to watch a movie. I wanted a love story. She wanted something with dancing. We settled on Sidelined 2.

Sidelined 2 picks up where the first Sidelined ended. Drayton (Noah Beck) is the starting quarterback at USC, even though he’s only a freshman and he’s really scrawny for a football player. (All of the football players in this movie looked too scrawny to be playing for a top-ranked program.) Dallas (Siena Agudong) is studying dance at Cal Arts and trying to figure out how to pay for her semester after she learns her scholarship won’t cover everything.

They’re in love but they still struggle because they’re going to different schools and they both have to figure out how to balance their relationship with all of their other responsibilities. Drayton tears his ACL and becomes bitter. Dallas gets a job at a coffeehouse and her boss has really messy bangs and keeps singing songs on his guitar. Dallas and Drayton realizes that there are other possibilities out there. Will their relationship last?

I thought the first Sidelined was cute for what it was. The second one was pretty boring and whatever charm the two leads had in the first film disappeared during the sequel. Drayton’s not much of a boyfriend, even before he ruins his knee. Dallas says she’s never even been to Dallas, which is weird. If I was named after a city, I would visit. It’s a Wattpad movie and all of the dialogue sounds like it was written by an AI that had been programmed to try to sound young by dropping random slang. Drayton asks Dallas if she’s “hangry.” Lisa made me go back three times to make sure he actually said that.

James Van Der Beek comes back for five minutes. He used to be the teenager with a dream. Now, he’s playing the father of a teenager with a dream. Feel old, yet?

Drayton Lahey (Noah Beck) is a high school quarterback who is being pressured by his father (James Van Der Beek) to accept a football scholarship to “Waco.” (I guess that’s supposed to be Baylor.) Drayton has the talent to turn pro and he’ll be a starter if he goes to Waco, despite being only a freshman. (Maybe it isn’t Baylor. Baylor football coaches aren’t that dumb.) But Drayton likes a cheerleader named Dallas Bryan (Sienna Agudong), who is the sister of his coach (Drew Ray Tanner) and who wants to go to California after she graduates so that she can pursue her dream of being a professional dancer.

It’s a slickly-made high school football movie and, even worse, it’s a Wattpad movie so there’s no surprises to be found here. I was able to predict every line of dialogue before the characters said it. The plot was old-fashioned but the actors said stuff like, “I’m tired of your main character energy,” just to make sure that we all knew the movie was made in 2024. I was a cheerleader in high school but no one on our football team was offered a scholarship anywhere. I could still relate to some parts of the movie, though. It was always awkward after the games when the parents would yell at the players because they dropped a pass or threw an interception. Even our bad players were put under a lot of pressure and, as cheerleaders, a big part of our job was to make everyone felt like a winner even when they were losing. We were good at our job but, by the end of the year, we still had a losing season and no scholarships.

Sienna Agudong was believable in the lead role but I had a hard time buying TikTok star Noah Beck as a quarterback with the talent to be a freshman starter or to even go pro. The big “star” in this movie was James Van Der Beek, playing the type of humorless father figure that he used to rebel against in his teen idol days. If you can remember Dawson standing in that rowboat, this movie will make you feel old.