Chris Klein vs. Freddie Prinze Jr.
Battle of the Teen Lunkheads

As part of his (probably futile) efforts to convince the North American moviegoing public to see his latest movie, Scooby-Doo, Freddie Prinze Jr. appeared this week on The Late Show with David Letterman. Over the course of his brief interview, Prinze kept informing Letterman that he was "weird," "a bit off," "crazy," and so on. (However, the only evidence Prinze presented for his alleged wackitude was the fact that, over the course of his young life, he had made it a project to assemble all 340 TV episodes of Scooby-Doo on tape.) After a while, Prinze's insistence that his temperament was somehow all out of whack and nutty started to seem desperate -- as though his merely talking about his personality was his way of willing one into existence.

Because the thing is, we don't really believe that Freddie Prinze Jr. has a personality. We didn't believe it when he started showing up on talk shows wearing those fake eyeglasses, trying to look "intellectual." We almost started to think there was more to him than his shellacked exterior when we started hearing rumours that he might be gay, but then he got engaged to Sarah Michelle Gellar, and therefore definitely must be straight as a really butch arrow. But Freddie Prinze Jr. isn't weird or crazy or in the least way interesting. To dismiss him as "vanilla" would be an insult to the many creative and delicious uses to which one can put that versatile bean. Prinze is...well, you know that episode of Futurama where Fry learns that you can download celebrities from the internet into blank robots? Freddie Prinze Jr. is a blank robot -- only his handlers haven't had to download a celebrity personality into him for any role throughout his entire career. Even the titles of his films are so interchangeable that they blend into a big, tasteless stew -- She's All That Down to You Head Over Heels Here on Earth. Except, whoops, that last one wasn't one of Prinze's; it starred the next blank robot in the box: one Chris Klein.

That you could remove Prinze from any of his movies and slot in Klein -- or vice versa -- is less a comment on the sameness of their acting styles and more the inevitable result of a marketplace crammed to bursting with forgettable entertainment product cynically aimed at teenagers who are thought not to know any better. (And who, maybe, don't, because we certainly can't explain the success of the American Pie and I Know What You Did Last Summer franchises any other way.) In other words, the studios need a Say It Isn't So! and a Head Over Heels in a given year, but they can't have the same Ken doll playing the hapless moron flummoxed by the ways of women in both. It's the same principle that allows both Marley Shelton and Marisa Coughlan to co-exist simultaneously: neither one of them is distinctive enough to replace the other, and since there's enough work to go around, it takes a while before you even notice that they're not the same person. Was that Chris Klein in Wing Commander? Or...wait, was it Klein or Prinze in Rollerball? It's hard to recall when there are so many movies stacked up that virtually no one has ever seen.

Perhaps envying and wishing to copy the career trajectory of his Here on Earth co-star Josh Hartnett, Klein broke from the teen-movie herd to play a beleaguered enlisted man in We Were Soldiers earlier this year. We don't know how Klein did in the role (which, we allow, represents a significant departure from his other films) because -- again -- we didn't see it, but it was probably a gritty part that required Klein to get his face and hands dirty on occasion, which makes it a little hard to imagine Prinze playing it. That Klein is now trying to make a transition toward adult drama may be why Prinze, this week, is working so hard to convince us that he's a kooky nut: he might think this is his chance to lock up the bland leading twentysomething slot in perpetuity (or at least for the next three or four years, until the inevitable crow's feet age him out of the market) when Klein's back is turned. And maybe that will work in the long run, but for now...

Advantage: ...too close to call.