Switched bodies, same tired formula

17 Again
Review by Nathan Weinbender

Zac Efron appears shirtless within the first thirty seconds of “17 Again,” which tells you all you need to know about the film’s target audience.

The thirteen-year-old girls who will like this movie are going to see it because Efron is dreamy and starred in the massively popular “High School Musical” series. They probably won’t realize that “17 Again” egregiously copies the blueprints of all those body switch comedies from the ‘80s—“Vice Versa,” “Dream a Little Dream,” the similarly-titled “18 Again,” etc.

As if it wants to remind us how dated it is, the movie opens in 1989. Efron plays Mike O’Donnell, the star point guard on his high school basketball team. It’s the Big Game—the college recruiters are in the stands—but Mike leaves right in the middle of everything in order to be with his pregnant teenage sweetheart. His prospects of being a basketball star are shot, but, hey, at least he’s in love.

Flash forward to present day: Mike (now played by Matthew Perry) and his sweetheart Scarlett (Leslie Mann) have separated. He’s stuck in a dead-end job he hates, he can’t connect with his teenage kids and he’s living with his childhood friend Ned (Thomas Lennon), who designed successful computer software and has spent his millions on memorabilia from “The Lord of the Rings.”

Returning to his old high school, Mike runs into a magical janitor (Brian Doyle-Murray) who grants his wish of being, you guessed it, seventeen again. The next morning, Matthew Perry rolls out of bed as Zac Efron (I’d like to see the casting directors explain their reasoning there), and he seizes the chance to get his life right the second time around.

He re-enrolls in the same high school, rejoins the basketball team, goes toe to toe with his daughter’s jerky boyfriend, gets his nerdy son a date with the head cheerleader and works his way back into Scarlett’s life. She’s amazed that her son’s new friend looks remarkably like her ex-husband’s seventeen-year-old self, but he supplies a logical explanation: He’s the illegitimate son of Mike’s deadbeat brother. Uh huh.

The cast do what they can with sitcom material. Efron has a genuine, easy-going charm; no doubt he could take on roles that would leave this one in the dust. Mann, who is married to Judd Apatow, is just lovely; it’s a shame she has nothing to do here. And Lennon provides the only real laughs: The movie’s best scene has him dragging the sexy school principal out on a date and discovering they have more in common than they imagined.

“17 Again” plays out exactly as you’d expect it to, never taking a step in a direction we haven’t seen before. Its heart is in the right place, but, boy, is it formulaic. A wittier script would have acknowledged its debt to other movies: When Mike first showed up at Ned’s house in his seventeen-year-old body, Ned should have sat him down and shown him “Like Father, Like Son” or “Big,” just to let him know that body switch movies have long been irrelevant.

Directed by Burr Steers. Written by Jason Filardi. Starring Zac Efron, Leslie Mann, Thomas Lennon, Matthew Perry, Melora Hardin, Michelle Trachtenberg, Sterling Knight and Brian Doyle-Murray. PG-13; 102m.

Love is like a roller coaster

Adventureland
Review by Nathan Weinbender

Greg Motolla, who directed “Superbad,” is responsible for the new movie “Adventureland,” and having seen his previous film, which was a crass (but sweet) laff-a-minute teen comedy, I’m surprised by the soft-spoken wistfulness of this one.

The characters in “Superbad,” if you’ll recall, were high school seniors who were apprehensive about becoming grown-ups. The heroes of “Adventureland” aren’t much different: They’re just out of college, the world has made them cynical and they’re still waiting for that defining moment where they will march over into adulthood. That insecurity seemed charming in “Superbad;” now it just seems sort of pathetic.

Jesse Eisenberg (from “The Squid and the Whale”) plays James Brennan, who returns home after college still a virgin, heartbroken from a recent break-up and unsure of his future. His parents urge him to get a summer job, hoping he’ll make enough money to move to New York and become a journalist, and he ends up running the game booths at the local Adventureland theme park.

Everyone who works there either hates their job or is too stoned to care. The park is populated by familiar supporting characters: Joel, the nerdy best friend (Martin Starr), who informs us that all carnival games are rigged; Connell (Ryan Reynolds), the thirty-year-old mechanic who may or may not have once jammed with Lou Reed; and Bobby and Paulette (“SNL” cast members Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig), a weird married couple who manage the park.

And then there’s Em (Kristen Stewart), who is smart and pretty and obviously wounded. James is smitten, maybe because she’s really wounded and his wounds are merely superficial. Although Em likes him back, she’s still coping with the death of her mother, her father’s recent marriage and her self-destructive affair with the married Connell.

The cast here is great; I really can’t imagine anyone else playing these parts. Eisenberg, who looks like he could be Michael Cera’s older brother, really captures the egotism and neuroticism of a 24-year-old whose life would be perfect if he could just get out of this town. Starr is perfect as the philosophizing, pipe-smoking dweeb who, as a sign of affection, gives a girl a book by Gogol (“He died of self-inflicted starvation,” he explains). And Hader and Wiig get the film’s biggest laughs as the husband and wife who are oblivious to everything going on around them.

But it’s Kristen Stewart, now a superstar after appearing in “Twilight,” who is most impressive. For the critics who have regarded the lack of female perspective in modern comedies, here is a girl who is written to be more than the sum of her parts. Stewart is honest and headstrong and vulnerable all at the same time; she’s one of those natural performers who can say or do anything on-screen and we believe it. She’s got quite a career ahead of her, and not one that just involves chaste vampires.

“Adventureland” is set in 1987, but the angst it expresses is universal. No, it doesn’t explore any new territory, but it is a smart film, funny and nostalgic and sweet, where real life begins and ends when the summer does. That the characters are freed from the rigidity of sitcom plots and gross-out comedy routines and are allowed to live and breathe in the real world is one of the film’s many strengths.

Directed and written by Greg Mottola. Starring Jesse Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart, Martin Starr, Ryan Reynolds, Margarita Levieva, Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig. R; 107m.

Men will be boys

Step Brothers
Review by Nathan Weinbender

You’d think it would be impossible to make Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly totally unfunny, but “Step Brothers” does it. They play middle-aged men with the mental capacities of twelve-year-olds, and although the movie thinks their arrested development is amusing, I found it creepy and annoying. It’s mean-spirited, too: Ferrell and Reilly have played clueless dolts in the past, but they were goofily endearing. Here they come across as malicious sociopaths.

Ferrell is Brennan, who lives with his doting mother (Mary Steenburgen), and Reilly is Dale, who lives with his doting father (Richard Jenkins). When their parents fall in love and spontaneously tie the knot, Brennan and Dale are forced to live under the same roof and sleep in the same room. At first they despise one another, but they swiftly become friends when they discover they have similar interests, one of which is hating Brennan’s more successful younger brother.

It’s a thin premise, but it certainly could have worked, especially considering how naturally charismatic Ferrell and Reilly are—Ferrell was very funny in “Anchorman,” and Reilly stole every scene in “Talladega Nights.” But “Step Brothers” ignores the charm of its actors, imprisoning them in roles that are unpleasant and forces them into situations that exist as textbook examples of how not to write and perform comedy.

Take, for instance, a scene in which Brennan and Dale are harassed, bullied and beaten up by a group of little kids. It’s a funny concept, sure, but the script, written by Ferrell and director Adam McKay, doesn’t know when to quit. The sight of two overgrown men being terrorized by eight-year-olds is worth a laugh, but the movie takes the whole idea too far: The sequence drags on for too long and then ends with a close-up of Will Ferrell licking dog poo. That’s lazy, uninspired writing.

It doesn’t help, either, that no one in this movie is remotely likeable. In fact, most everybody is completely detestable. Brennan and Dale are intended to be loveable dopes, but they come across mentally retarded creeps who should either be hospitalized or euthanized. And Jenkins and Steenburgen, both terrific actors, are given thankless jobs as the parents: They wander through the movie looking embarrassed and uncomfortable, almost queasy. I know how they feel.

I have yet to mention the language in “Step Brothers,” which is needlessly vulgar. Now, I’m all for hard-R language, but only if it serves a purpose. Here, the curse words function as a punch line rather than as punctuation, so we’re supposed to laugh simply because the characters have filthy mouths. This movie seems to have been written by a dirty-minded teenager who was paid by the four-letter word.

Oh, the movie looks crummy, too, although it apparently had a budget of $50 million. They must have had some terrific catering on set.

Grade: C-

Directed by Adam McKay. Written by Will Ferrell and McKay. Starring Will Ferrell, John C. Reilly, Mary Steenburgen, Richard Jenkins and Adam Scott. R; 93m.