One of the highlights of having cable as a teenager was that whatever movie channel we had made a habit of showing the 1987 high-school comedy ''Can't Buy Me Love'' about 400 times a day. The story was simple enough. A nerd gives $1,000 to a mean popular girl to pay for the dress she ruined. In return, she pretends to be his girlfriend and makes him cool. The mean popular girl falls for nerd, of course, and nerd realizes that being popular is just another job. All the main characters were white, middle class, and suburban -- as Ronald the geek, Patrick Dempsey shot to fame as a ''Tiger Beat'' pinup for all the girls with an untamable dork fetish. But ''Can't Buy Me Love'' was universal, enjoyed by the white kids, the black kids, the Asians, and Latinos who've come across it. So is there any need for ''Love Don't Cost a Thing,'' the original film's ''urban'' multiracial overhaul, which tells exactly the same story with less energy but far more people of color? The movie is hard to justify as entertainment but transparent as a work of opportunistic cultural politicking. Sixteen years after ''Can't Buy Me Love,'' hip-hop is at the core of youth culture, and young black stars can now carry movies. But it seems, according to Troy Beyer, the actress and this remake's co-writer and director, they just can't carry any original ones. Set in Southern California, the movie takes its name from a Jennifer Lopez hit, and it re-imagines itself in pretty much the same upper-middle-class land of privilege as its source material. Only here, the kids speak in up-to-the-minute slang (''On the real,'' ''scoop me up,'' and ''holla'') and wear oversize Sean John sweat suits and platinum jewels. The cool kids bling. Beyer apparently thought her job was done after the costuming and casting, however. Her movie is flat and witless and moves at the speed of a mid-tempo ballad. Nick Cannon plays Alvin, an Afroed car freak who finds himself in an advantageous position when he notices the damaged Escalade of Paris Morgan (Christina Milian) sitting at the auto shop where he works. She may be a cheerleader who doesn't know his name, but fixing the car, which belongs to her mother, is going to take $3,000 she doesn't have. They strike a deal. He'll use the money he's been saving to buy and install the parts Paris needs, provided that she's seen with him at lunch and between classes. Overnight, Alvin goes from looking like Michael Jackson in ''The Wiz'' to some hanger-on in any rapper's entourage. His parents (Vanessa Bell Calloway and Steve Harvey) hardly recognize him, his buddies (Kenan Thompson, Kal Penn, and Kevin Christy) disown him, and little sister Aretha (Ashley Monique Carter) thinks he's on drugs. The movie is so dependant on its source material that it fails to put Carter, Thompson, Penn, and Christy to better use. Cannon, who was fun in last year's ''Drumline,'' is encouraged to do whatever he wants here, which means that in some scenes he's funny, but his popular incarnation is just a pose he winks his way through. Sixteen years seems like plenty of time to come up with an intelligent, freethinking student body, but that's not in evidence here. When Paris defends Alvin to her disapproving friends by proclaiming that ''I'm rolling with Al because [long, clueless pause] I'm with him,'' you should be nervous. If it's unfair to beat up on this movie's lack of originality, it's not wrong to wonder why Beyer has such a hard time waking the movie up. The classic moment in the original comes when the newly popular Ronald gets everybody to gyrate like him at a dance. The same sequence here looks like something left behind by the ''American Idol'' turkey, ''From Justin to Kelly.''

By Wesley Morris, Globe Staff
Boston Globe Published: 12/12/2003