Anyone who’s even vaguely aware of this 16-year-old’s unlikely rise to musical superstardom isn’t going to learn anything new from “Justin Bieber: Never Say Never,” an interminable documentary punctuated by perhaps half an hour of heavily edited 3-D performance footage.
Just in case you’ve been living under a rock, here’s the story: The child of a teenage single mother in Stratford, Ontario, is a mediocre soccer player in school who captivates audiences as a preteen street magician.
His mother puts videos up on YouTube, where he’s “discovered” at age 12 by Scooter Braun — as his camera-hogging manager reminds us roughly every 30 seconds.
Scooter introduces Justin to his musical mentor, Usher. The androgynous teenager becomes a social-networking phenomenon, drawing successively larger crowds as he tours North America’s radio stations and shopping malls, charming one and all.
Besides much redundant archival footage, there are what appear to be carefully staged scenes of this “regular” kid (who does dozens of concert dates a year) hanging with his Canadian buddies and his “extended dysfunctional family” backstage.
There are fleeting glimpses of Justin’s father and Justin looking at school books. But there’s virtually no sense of what this scrawny teen (shown bare-chested several times) is actually like as a person (he smiles a lot) or what kind of life he really lives.
Instead, we see endless montages of Justin and Scooter distributing complimentary tickets to fans.
The film slowly builds up to Justin’s first appearance at Madison Square Garden, where his show sold out in 22 minutes.
He pouts briefly for the camera when a cold forces the cancellation of an earlier stop on the tour.
But everything is OK on the big night after fans tweet their get-well wishes.
It’s easy for a grown-up to be cynical about “Justin Bieber: Never Say Never,” which amounts to a G-rated infomercial for the Bieber brand.
Tween fans priced out of his shows will likely be more than thrilled with the unremarkable performance footage (with guest artists like Miley Cyrus) supervised by director Jon M. Chu (“Step Up 3D”).
Not to mention a montage of Justin flipping his trademark locks.