First of all, he doesn't. Titillating imperative to the contrary, no one buys the farm in John Tucker Must Die.

Not even close. Hopeful cinephiles might long for pitch-black satire á la Heathers (in which the title characters must die and do, at least in part), but this by-the-book high school revenge comedy has the spine of a wet ramen noodle.

Early on, three of the star cad's ex-girlfriends discuss appropriate punishment — death is one of the less-violent options — but they're not serious. They speak figuratively, the only acceptable option in a PG-13 undertaking that spins humor off of rampant adolescent promiscuity but presumably wouldn't tolerate a little murder between friends.

If you can call them that. The film introduces us to one John Tucker (Jesse Metcalfe, the lawn boy on Desperate Housewives), a basketball captain and himbo girlfriend-juggler whose cheatin' heart is revealed when three concomitant squeezes wind up in gym class together. This being Stereotype Central, one of the girlfriends is a bookworm (Aquamarine's Arielle Kebbel), another is a vegan activist (Sophia Bush, One Tree Hill), and the third is a skin-deep cheerleader named, yep, Heather (R&B singer Ashanti).

A cat fight erupts by the volleyball net, catching mousy-outsider Kate (Brittany Snow) in the crossfire. It ends when she remarks, "The guy is cheating on all of you, and instead of taking it out on him, you're beating up on each other?" Thus begins the revenge plot, which involves evil rumors (J.T. has VD!) and estrogen supplements (J.T. has sensitive nipples!) but settles, finally, on transforming Kate into a robotic super-vixen programmed to break his heart.

At this point, one would expect the movie to echo Mean Girls and She's All That, and one would be right. Just envision teenagers in female attack position — hand on hip, chin thrusts at the ready — and you get the general idea. John Tucker Must Die also features Penn Badgley (from The Bedford Diaries) as John's supposedly not-hot brother, who's the unsuspecting recipient of this grammarian's nightmare: "I thought he was you guys's (pronounced EWE GIZES) god!"

So says Kate, who assumes everyone on the b-ball team, like, worships J.T. Like, duh. The entire, unspoken aim of the movie seems to be slobbering J.T. worship. His liar's charm deserves comeuppance but never gets it; the film can't ignore the guy's infernal cuteness long enough to really smack him around. (And while shots of Metcalfe in a thong are good for a laugh, endless adoring scenes of a near-naked Tucker are a bit, cough, unseemly. A reference to Abercrombie doesn't help.)

Director Betty Thomas (who made the instantly forgettable I-Spy) and screenwriter Jeff Lowell, a TV sitcom scribe, can't decide what they want. They want to be hip and punchy and cruel, and they want their herpes jokes, but they also want everything hunky-dory in the end. In the finale's group catharsis, the dirtbag playa and his vengeful harpies smoosh birthday cake into each other's faces before a teeming crowd.

So John Tucker Must Die, must he? If you insist. Just kill the movie first.