Plot
The movie begins with Kate (Brittany Snow) discussing her mother Lori's (Jenny McCarthy) series of bad relationships which always causes the family to move to a new town. She and her mother move to a new town and Kate gets a job as a waitress. While at work, she sees popular local boy John Tucker (Jesse Metcalfe) on dates with three different girls: Carrie (Arielle Kebbel), a chronic overachiever; Heather (Ashanti), who is a sassy, aggressive head cheerleader; and Beth (Sophia Bush) a promiscuous vegan activist. Kate learns from a co-worker that he dates girls from different cliques at his school so that they never interact and convinces the girls who he dates to keep their relationships secret.
One day in gym class, Kate, Carrie, Heather and Beth end up on the same team for a volleyball game. During the game, Carrie brags about being with John Tucker, and the girls learn about his scheme. Carrie, Heather and Beth begin fighting and Kate tries to break up the fight, only to land them all in detention. Later, Kate is enlisted to help in the retaliation against John Tucker. In the meantime Kate becomes friends with John's brother Scott (Penn Badgley), better known as "The Other Tucker". The girls' initial attempts to undo John (making people believe he has genital herpes and undermining his confidence by giving him estrogen) backfire as John manages to use them to his advantage. After he breaks up with all three girls, they agree that breaking his heart is the ideal revenge. They then enlist Kate to be the heartbreaker.
Kate joins the cheerleading team in order to get John's attention and the girls give her advice on how to act around John and spy on the dates using surveillance equipment. Kate and John go on a series of dates, the first of which at a bonfire at the beach. Kate is unprepared after John asks to take her home and Beth intervenes to teach her how to kiss. However, John arrives, forcing Beth to hide in the back of his Land Rover. At her house, Kate manages to buy Beth time to escape by kissing John, with Beth's skirt being ruined in the process.
The next date is a romantic boat ride, and Kate and John have a good time together. Beth later notices that Kate is starting to fall for John. To counteract this, Carrie tapes John bragging to his friends in the locker room, saying he'll be scoring "more than baskets" at the away game, and shows the tape to Kate in order to get her to snap out of it. The girls try another plan to embarrass John Tucker at a hotel on the night of the away game. Kate seduces John on a video-chat and tells him to put on a woman's thong and climb out of his room and into hers. He accidentally climbs into a teacher's room and becomes the laughingstock of the school. John again uses this to his advantage, starting a fashion trend.
Meanwhile, Kate's mother and Scott both discover the plan and lament the change in Kate's behavior. Afterward, Kate tells John that she heard about what he said in the locker room about her. John makes amends by giving her his watch and asking her to be his girlfriend. Kate tells Heather, Carrie and Beth that she wants out of the plan, as whether they are dating or plotting to destroy John Tucker, it is still all about him.
At John's birthday party, the tape the girls made of John's destruction is played, and Kate reveals the entire plot. Heather, Beth, and Carrie defend her after a guest throws his drink at Kate. Still, John Tucker is unfazed, and the party devolves into a cake fight.
A few days later, John and Kate agree to be friends, and John resolves to be honest, telling his new girlfriend about his other girlfriend. Scott, happy that Kate confessed, becomes her lab partner again, and it is hinted the two will begin dating. Kate is now good friends with Beth, Carrie, and Heather. Kate finishes saying, "as for the girl who made John Tucker fall in love, well, she's a legend."
After the credits, Kate warns viewers at home wanting to try this that destroying a man has consequences, and the camera pans to several male teachers bending over to grab some papers, all wearing thongs. In a mid-credits scene, some high school students in Tokyo, Japan are seen goggling over the picture of John wearing female thongs.
Read more about this topic: John Tucker Must Die
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.”
—Jane Rule (b. 1931)
“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)