YMMV / Bring It On

• Adorkable: Torrance in the memorable bathroom scene with Cliff, doing various adorably dorky things, such as trying to cover up spitting when she's brushing her teeth.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • The extremely popular theory that Courtney and Whitney are, in fact, speaking the truth when they describe Missy as an Uber-Dyke, and that therefore the ending is a classic case of Did Not Get the Girl, with a side order of I Want My Beloved to Be Happy. Courtney and Whitney's relationship could also be taken as closeted gay best friends.
  • Whitney's little sister Jamie giving a lacklustre tryout, despite the other girls hyping her up. Is Whitney just blind to her sister's badness? Or is Jamie normally much better and she was just nervous trying out in front of the older girls? Do they just want her because she's a useful prop? Or does Whitney want her because Jamie won't upstage her?
  • Speaking of Jamie, her audition wasn't just underwhelming, she also sounded actively bored with the whole thing. Combined with not hearing Jamie's take on this and Whitney's general pushiness, it's enough to beg the question if she even wanted to be a cheerleader at all, or did Whitney just drag her along to use as a prop and Jamie basically sabotaged herself to bail out on something she really didn't want to do.
• Best Known for the Fanservice:
  • One of the few things all six movies have in common — several name actresses dressed up in cheerleader outfits that show plenty of skin. Notably the first film's outfits bare the midriff — something which is not allowed on high school teams.
  • And of course the car wash scene in the first movie, getting Kirsten Dunst and Eliza Dushku into bikinis.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: All Or Nothing opens with a fire themed(?) High-School Dance type thing that ends with Britney farting. The whole sequence turns out to be All Just a Dream.
• Cliché Storm: Most of the sequels do retreads of the first film's plot, usually with an anti-racism Aesop tacked on.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Missy, from the first movie. It helped that she was played by Eliza Dushku.
• Fan-Preferred Couple: Most of the fans of the first movie pair Torrance with Missy instead of her brother Cliff. This is due to their friendship that is littered with heaps of Les Yay, as well as Torrance really wanting Missy on the team and the two instantly hitting it off. Also, many fans feeling that they have better chemistry than her with Cliff. On Archive of Our Own they have the most fanfiction of any ship from the film series.
• First Installment Wins: The term "the original and best" is widely considered to apply with Bring It On, although Bring It On: All or Nothing is felt to be the best of the sequels (in part because of who appears). To be fair, all the films are stupid and fun to watch, but the original is genuinely good and charming.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • In It To Win It features Jennifer Tisdale; a few years later her sister Ashley would put on her own cheerleading uniform.
  • In the first film, Cliff has a poster of The Ramones, complete with "GABBA GABBA HEY" on it.
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans recognizing Eliza Dushku and Clare Kramer may find it amusing to see Faith and Glory on a cheerleading squad. Made even funnier due to their characters' personalities bearing just enough of a resemblance to imagine some sort of alternate universe.
  • If you're a Sabrina the Teenage Witch fan, seeing Lindsay Sloane as Big Red is hysterical. On Sabrina, Lindsay played Valerie - a neurotic wannabe who was desperate to be popular, frequently sucked up to the Alpha Bitch and made it onto the second string cheerleading squad.
  • All or Nothing wouldn’t be the last time that Hayden Panettiere would be a cheerleader.
    • And Danielle Savre would again play a cheerleader on the same squad.
  • The Clovers write to a talk show host Pauletta Patterson asking for money. Gabrielle Union would play a character with that name on BET series Being Mary Jane.
  • In regards to the OBC of the musical:
    • Taylor Louderman and Kate Rockwell (Campbell and Skylar, respectively) would both go on to star in the musical adaptation of Mean Girls, but their roles would be the exact inverse of what they played previously; Taylor goes from the well-meaning Campbell to the infamous Alpha Bitch Regina George, while Kate goes from Alpha Bitch Skylar to Karen Smith, Regina’s ditzy but kind follower.
    • Similarly, Elle McLemore, who played Bitch in Sheep's Clothing Eva, would go on to originate the role of Heather McNamara in Heathers, a member of the titular clique who is revealed to be a genuinely nice person.
• Hollywood Pudgy: One of the cheerleaders from the first movie (and the third one as well) is repeatedly criticized for having a rather large backside. She's not that much more heavy than any of the other girls on the squad.
• Les Yay: Torrance and Missy in the first movie have a Pseudo-Romantic Friendship, Torrance defends Missy from the other cheerleaders, and their friendship is given slightly more screen time than Torrance's budding romance with Cliff. One of the most blatant cases is this scene, where Torrance seems more excited than the guys about Missy in her cheerleader uniform.
  Torrance: TAKE IT OFF!
• Memetic Mutation: The first film brought the terms "jazz hands" and "spirit fingers" into the popular lexicon.
• Narm Charm:
  • The first film is genuinely good, with a dose of fun dumbness to it. The sequels get more and more narmy each time, but are fun to watch anyways.
  • The "Just What I Need" scene in the first film is just too cute to hate.
• One-Scene Wonder: The Shameless Fanservice Girl who tries out for the squad in the first movie, doing a memorably sexy dance to "Cherry Pie".
• Periphery Demographic: A popular choice for showing in schools towards the end of term, because for some reason boys are happy to watch it as well.
• Platonic Writing, Romantic Reading: Torrance and Missy share far more scenes and make more of a connection than Torrance does with Cliff - who in fact is such a Satellite Love Interest that his very function seems just to be to prove that Torrance is into guys.
• Retroactive Recognition: Hanna Marin in In It To Win It. And Imogen Moreno in Worldwide #Cheersmack. And Ryan Drummond in the first film. And Maya Bishop in All Or Nothing.
• Sequelitis: After the success of the first film, five Direct-To-Video movies were made, all not having any form of continuity with the original whatsoever.
• Special Effects Failure: The camera angles used in the first film make it very obvious when they switch to a shot of Eliza Dushku's stunt double performing Missy's gymnastics for the team.
• Testosterone Brigade: Although aimed at girls, the films are popular with guys as well for reasons not unconnected with watching Kirsten Dunst, Eliza Dushku, Bethany Joy Lenz, Hayden Panettiere, Ashley Benson, Christina Milian et al running around and jumping up and down in abbreviated attire.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The sequels have been accused of just rehashing the first's plot, with sprinklings of a moral about prejudice. However, a Perspective Flip from a team like the Clovers would make ripe material for a film in its own right. The third film,All or Nothing, comes the closest to having a plot like this as the protagonist transfers to an underfunded school with a squad similar to the Clovers.
• Unintentional Period Piece: From the fashion to the music, everything about the first film screams late 90s/early 00s. Additionally, the reveal that Big Red had been stealing the routines from the Clovers would be much harder to pull off in the days of the internet, social media and more widespread videos among teens. Big Red probably wouldn't have to steal routines from them; she could likely get inspiration from YouTube. As could the Toros later in the film.
  • The fourth movie, 2007's In It To Win It, likely suffers the worst of this, as the whole movie's climax hinges on the unified teams taking inspiration for their final routine from the Dueling Dragons roller coasters in Universal Studios theme park, which strongly dates the movie to before three major events. First, the ride was renamed "Dragon Challenge'' and given a rebrand into part of The Wizarding World of Harry Potter attraction at the park in 2010. Then, in 2011, after several reported injuries of people getting hit with loose objects during the near-misses of the two separate-but-intertwined tracks, Universal declared they were eliminating the coaster's "dueling" gimmick and would permanently stagger the launches of the coasters. Finally, the entire ride was retired and replaced in 2017.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Cliff comes off much worse than intended when he cold-shoulders Torrance towards the end of the second act - and the narrative suggests Torrance is in the wrong for leading him on and not saying she had a boyfriend. Except that Torrance doesn't lead him on, and is under no obligation to announce her relationship status to a boy she barely knows. None of her interactions with him have any deliberate signals that they're anything more than Just Friends, and Cliff is the one who jumps the gun and makes a move, only to discover she has a boyfriend. Torrance feels bad that his feelings got hurt and he was a little embarrassed, but she did nothing wrong.
• Values Dissonance:
  • There is some casual homophobia on the part of some characters. While Whitney and Courtney calling Missy an "uber dyke" is meant to show them as bullies, there is some of this underlying Torrance's relationship with Aaron. He's a fellow cheerleader, quite the Camp Straight and shown as a Romantic False Lead. Aaron's college girlfriend even laughs at him when she finds out he was a cheerleader.
  • Basically anything that Sparky says and does, even if purposefully written to be a half-crazy asshole, from using the "r-word," fat-shaming Darcy and Courtney (both who aren't even remotely fat)- even telling Darcy to "stop eating", and whipping Missy's butt with a towel.
  • Jan perving over Whitney's tween sister wasn't deemed funny in-universe, but now is beyond disgusting, to the point where it comes off as cringeworthy and unfunny today. The same goes for Jan talking about how he sometimes "accidentally" slips his fingers inside Courtney's underwear when he's lifting her, which is treated as Handsome Lech shenanigans in the movie but would be considered sexual assault today. It's worth noting however that, at the first football game scene, Courtney makes a show of bending over in front of him and giving him a very flirtatious glance, suggesting that this could be a bit of banter between them.^note Courtney doesn't seem to mind too much when he does it during the game, reacting as though she sees it as a playful annoyance, and they have a few other moments of Ship Tease throughout the film, so it could be consensual behaviour. Jan notably doesn't behave this way towards any other girl on the squad. Of course, were the film made today, that aspect would be clarified or not included at all (although the 2019 sequel came under fire for including a similar joke).
• Values Resonance:
  • Cruel Cheerleader was a popular trope in the 90s, painting cheerleaders as either Alpha Bitches or ditzy whores. The movie shows cheerleading as a genuine athletic pursuit, Missy learns that it's far more challenging than she thought, and the team are shown putting a lot of time and effort into choreographing their routines. Despite the film's goofy tone, it portrays cheerleading in a positive way. It treats male cheerleaders pretty well too, rather than stereotyping them all. Indeed, in spite of the above Values Dissonance with the casual homophobia, at the end Les, who had been established as gay early on, has a Meet Cute moment with a male cheerleader on one of the other teams at Nationals, a specific choice to give this moment to the gay character instead of having it be another straight character (like fellow male cheerleader Jan).
  • The anti-racism Aesop is thankfully not too Anvilicious and handled in a good way. No one in the movie is overtly racist but they do become aware of the system in place - Big Red stealing the Clovers' routines and winning with them for over five years because they're too poor to afford to go to competitions parallels abuse of privilege and appropriation. Torrance tries to invoke White Man's Burden by lending the Clovers money to make it to the competition, but they turn it down and raise the money themselves. But they face each other as Worthy Opponents. One critic said that the film suggests "race relations could be smoothed and transcended through level-playing-field sports competitiveness." As this article discusses, the criticism of white performers stealing dance moves from black artists would resonate more in the late 2010s and early 2020s, with black social media influencers calling out and even boycotting communities that use their choreography without credit.