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Fashion-minded and artistic Kelly Collins (Hilary Duff, "Lizzie McGuire") finds her world turned upside-down when her mom marries the new commandant of a military academy. Kelly packs her bags for boot camp and moves with her family to the academy, only to become the school's newest and clumsiest cadet with the world's meanest Cadet Captain (Christy Carlson Romano). It's up to Kelly to make the best of a bad situation, win over the school and leave her unique mark.

Disney presents an earlier Hilary Duff flick, before she started to make the move from gracing teeny-bopper magazines to weekly gossip rags. Even as a made-for-tv film, this one is pretty much film-by-the-numbers, with cute girl in a "fish out of water" situation - in this case, a military school. (the horror!)

While I don't begrudge Ms. Duff any ill will whatsoever, I've never considered her much of a thespian, and "Cadet Kelly" is just more fluff in her growing list of such films. I fully admit that I'm not the target audience for this type of film, yet I subjected myself to watching it just the same - the end result being I'm done with Hilary Duff films until she starts to branch out a bit more. Skip it, unless she's one of your idols.

Video: How's it look?
Presented in a fullscreen transfer, the video portion of this disc looks just fine - good colour, good detail, no screen uglies - a perfectly good transfer.

Audio: How's it sound?
The Dolby 5.1 mix is equally as good - clean dialogue, nice mixing in of music, little in the way of surrounds, but nothing really lost or missed there.

Extras: What all's on the DVDs?

• commentary with 2 actresses (not Hilary Duff, though)
• "Learning the Drills" featurette
• interactive game
• trailers

Closing Thoughts
Cutesy Hilary Duff film + some nice extras = nice one for fans of the Dufster