17 Again (review)
The best thing that can be said about this gender-swapped trifle of a riff on Freaky Friday -- as a movie in itself -- is that it’s entirely inoffensive, even when it shouldn’t be. (The sex ed-class scene, for one, avoids feeling as icky and awkward as it could have.) The best thing we might be saying about this movie 20 years from now is that it was the first time that Zac Efron (High School Musical 3: Senior Year) showed real promise of a career as an adult... that is, if he plays it right and gets lucky and actually ends up with one. As plausibility goes, I’m not sure which is the least likely: that Matthew Perry (The Whole Ten Yards), as a man disappointed with his life, would meet a magic janitor (Brian Doyle-Murray: Daddy Day Camp) who would zap him back to his teen years (while still remaining in the 21st century) so he can “do it all over again”; that a youthenized, removed-from-his-grownup-misery Perry would regress into Efron (Perry, for all his own charms, is no cinema idol); or that the star jock that Perry/Efron was in high school would have been BFFs with the school’s biggest dork (Thomas Lennon [I Love You, Man] as an adult). Still, all that really matters here is not that the script, by Jason Filardi (Bringing Down the House), is easy and obvious, or that Burr Steers’ direction is, thankfully, not dedicated to brutalizing his protagonist the way that it was in his previous flick, 2002’s Igby Goes Down. It’s that Efron dominates the screen with his charm and his effortless comic timing, and makes you long to see what he will do when he gets a chance at an actual grownup role.
viewed at a private screening with an audience of critics
rated PG-13 for language, some sexual material and teen partying
official site | IMDB | trailer | more reviews at MRQE
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comments
posted by dafydd (Wed Apr 15 09, 11:10PM)
Yeah...Efron was very good with the material he had and in many scenes he pulled off a pretty fair Perry impression. In fact, the lass from the Office also showed a bit of range too.
As a fellow geek MJ, I think the "wait for dvd" tag should be upgraded to "see it" purely for the Gandalf the White/Elvish exchange.
posted by Accounting Ninja (Thu Apr 16 09, 9:19AM)
You know what I always thought would be interesting? A drama with this premise. Like, show the trials he would face suddenly being young(having to start over, no one taking you seriously), and how it would affect his marriage and relationships with his kids. And not have him Get Better in the end. Now, that would be interesting!
posted by Martin (Wed May 06 09, 7:19PM)
Just seen it and it struck me just how much this is thematically the same as Back to the Future. Instead of Marty McFly going back in time to save his parents lives whilst his mother falls for him, we have Michael becoming a kid again to save his kids lives whilst his daughter falls for him. They even had the "I was having this crazy nightmare" scene.
posted by Anne-Kari (Sat Aug 15 09, 9:40AM)
Wow. I just rented this on a whim, and I was kinda shocked at how good Zac Efron is. Really good. My kids are not old enough for the whole High School Musical phenom, so the only thing I've seen him in was the brief appearance on "Firefly", which was not the best child acting I've ever seen. But he really was terrific in this.
He's such a Pretty Boy, I think it'll be hard for him not be typecast. Here's hoping that going forward, he makes Johnny Depp choices rather than, say, Ashton Kutcher choices.