Finally a comedy with Rebel Wilson in which the chuckling doesn’t depend on harsh jokes.
In Senior Year, a nostalgic sugar rush directed by Alex Hardcastle, Wilson plays Stephanie, a coma patient who wakes up 20 years after a failed cheerleading stunt. Stephanie’s last pre-coma memory is that of a coin toss that carried her ten feet into the air, a height from which she could see her entire future: she would be the queen of the prom, marry a handsome jock and the rest of her life. living in a suburb. bliss. Then her head hit the gym floor. (In flashbacks, a teenage Stephanie is played by Angourie Rice.) She wakes up as a 37-year-old (Wilson) with the brutal immaturity to enroll in her old high school and assert her reign as a popular beauty.
The big joke is the radical shift in youth culture’s atmosphere from hierarchy to equality. Stephanie, a millennial, is stunned to find that her new, Gen Z classmates reject the whole concept of a pecking order. She doesn’t quite believe the screenplay (by Andrew Knauer, Arthur Pielli and Brandon Scott Jones); it seems to indicate that bullying has mutated into selfish, weaponized empathy.
The film’s early snarl gets just as tacky and insincere as the cultural ambiguity parodied on it. In the final act, the dialogue is so burdened by inspiring maxims about personal authenticity that it feels like the script has been hijacked by quotes from the yearbook. The director, Hardcastle, doesn’t seem to care about these scenes. Instead, he focuses his energies on a reenactment of Britney Spears’ 1999 music video for “(You Drive Me) Crazy,” which hits the screen with such spunk that you’ll suspect it was the motivation for making the film. – and probably will be the public’s reason for looking at it.
Last year
Rated R for sex, swearing and substance abuse. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes. Watch on Netflix.
