We all do things sometimes that are a little embarrassing. Walking out of the bathroom with toilet paper stuck to our heel. Telling a friend you let a smelly one go just as everyone in the room stops talking. Sometimes you’re just “that guy”… the guy walking into the theatre to see 17 AGAIN…alone…while every 12-year-old girl in Los Angeles County seems to be staring at you. My parents would always say that the world didn’t revolve around me. They were right, thankfully. In actuality I think that the world must revolve around Zac Efron - that is as soon as he starts nailing 3-pointers with his shirt off and I quickly realized no 12-year-old girl in her right mind really cared about the creepy guy sitting in the back of the theatre.
17 AGAIN stars Zac Efron (High School Musical 1,2,3) as Mathew Perry (Friends) as Mike O’Donnell, the star basketball player at Hayden High, who is probably the most likable guy you could ever want to meet. That is, of course, before he gets his girlfriend pregnant, quits the basketball team in the opening seconds of the big game, thus forfeiting the big scholarship he was destined to get. This series of events causes him to spend the next 20 years of his life complaining about “what could have been”. While most of us, especially those who were lucky enough to be as cool as Mike O’Donnell was at 17, all have moments when we wonder about “what could have been”, Mike O’Donnell the adult actually gets the chance to see. With a little help from the most likely of places, the janitor (Brain Doyle-Murray…ass-sphincter says what?), Mike takes on the form of his 17 year old body in the present day and the movie starts to take shape.
I remember watching movies like this when I was younger. The stylized high school experience, the big parties, the big games, the girls who acted like women. I remember watching all these movies and thinking about how fresh and up to date they were. As I watched this movie I tried to identify how many movies 17 AGAIN ripped off, or at least where they got their ideas. I lost count.
Part Teen Wolf, part Big, part Back to the Future, part The Breakfast Club, part It’s a Wonderful Life, part…. okay, you get the point. While 17 AGAIN reminded me of a lot of movies that I had seen, they are all movies I like. A wise person once said, “amateurs imitate art, professionals steal it”. There sure was a lot of stealing going on here and that’s fine with me, cause it worked. While I don’t want to make this movie out to be better than it was, it wasn’t bad either. In fact, I laughed a lot and I even had a moment that caused me to reflect on my own life and the descions I have made (Zacs’ baby blues will do that to you).
Mathew Perry was pretty inconsequential in this flick. I found myself wondering who made the decision that Zac Efron grows up to be Mathew Perry…poor kid. Leslie Mann (Knocked Up) who plays the wife/mother is always fun to watch and has great timing, not to mention great chemistry with a younger man. Thomas Lennon (LT. Dangle, Reno 911!) is Mike’s best friend (which is only believable in the world of movies) plays a Lord of the Rings loving nerd turned millionaire computer software developer. Posing as Mike's father he falls in love with the schools hard-boiled principal Jane Masterson (Melora Hardin, The Office). They had some funny scenes together that helped break the story up but ultimately their characters felt a little too contrived and fell flat.
Not having seen any of the High School Musical series I didn’t know what to expect from Efron, but I was actually pretty impressed. Good looking, charming, and a pretty smart actor, I just hope that this kid can move out of the high school genre and grow up a little…or at least get a little dirtier…dare I say a Risky Business remake?
This is your typical “spirit-body transformation”/high school coming-of-age/love story. Its got some good laughs and it moves along at nice pace. PG-13 has to be a tough rating to go for while trying to be funny, heartfelt and actually appropriate for 13 year olds and adults alike but overall it did its job.
My Vote: Take a chance with it, you might be surprised.
