Delayed Reaction: 10 Years

The Pitch: I wish my high school reunion was more entertaining.

High school reunions are very popular in TV and movies. Whether it's dancing to a Cindy Lauper song as a last "fuck you" to all the people who treated you like shit or going just to realize that you were in fact the bully or even going to get hammered and make an ass of yourself, some of my favorite storylines come from High School reunions. I get why. High school is a time that you're old enough to remember well but long enough ago that you can be completely changed or tragically the same. It's a time before the realities of the world limited your possibilities. A reunion story is the a present day prequel story.

It should come as no surprise that I was really looking forward to seeing 10 Years since I first heard about it. That cast was good at the time, and five years later is looking like a murderers row of talent. Channing Tatum, Chris Pratt, and Oscar Isaac alone would be enough to make this mandatory viewing. But then there's also Aubrey Plaza, Kate Mara, Rosario Dawson, Anthony Mackie, Scott Porter, Ari Graynor, Jenna Dewan-Tatum, and I'll stop there. That's a cast designed for me. Counter-intuitively enough, the one thing that kept me from seeing this sooner is that I haven't heard from anyone who has seen it. How does this movie stay under the radar for this long? Something must be wrong with it.

10 Years isn't a perfect movie. No one's high school class is that good looking or filled with such an interesting array of back stories. It plays like a checklist of all the tropes that you'd expect: The guy who has been nurturing a crush for a decade, the former "it couple" who are seeing each other for the first time in years, the former bully who wants to apologize for who he was [and still is], the wife who learns about her husband's past, the girl who never left town, the guy who couldn't be further away from town than he is. It's all there, and there's so much story to balance that very few characters get the necessary shading to really be interesting.

Mostly though, I liked this. Writer/director Jamie Linden successfully balances a large cast. The parts that he idealized (Oscar Isaac and Kata Mara's romance, Justin Long, Max Minghella, and Lynn Collins dropping their facades) play sweetly enough. Other parts, he leaves messy or resists the urge to make "hollywood". I like that it never really makes you think that Tatum and Dawson will get back together. I loved how Pratt's character thinks that he's not a dick anymore and completely reverts back to old ways. You feel for his wife (Graynor) while also getting the sense that she's already done the math that the good outweighs the bad with him.

From pacing to structure to execution, this isn't a movie that I see getting made that often, so I'm glad that this pet project of Channing Tatum's did come together. It's not perfect. I don't need perfect. What I'd love to see is a 20 year reunion movie with this cast

Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend