Premise: An aimless MIT grad who has moved back home in the mid-80s goes on an epic night of partying where he hopes to finally hit it off with his high school crush.
It's hard to know where to begin with this movie. It's bad in a slightly charming way. Its greatest strength was negated by the fact that it sat on the shelf for 4 years (filmed in 2007; released in 2011). The casting of this movie is great and only gets better when you considered when they made it. In 2007, Chris Pratt was a bit-actor from The O.C. and Everwood. He didn't even have Bride Wars to his credit. Teresa Palmer barely had any U.S. movies yet. Anna Faris was right in the middle of her post-Scary Movie RomCom run of moderate success (Just Friends, The House Bunny). Topher Grace was just in the biggest movie of the year Spider-Man 3. And, even though that movie wasn't that well liked, it was fair to assume that he could've been on an upward trajectory from then. Hell, it even cast Demetri Martin as he was about to go into his biggest wave of success. However, by 2011, the cast didn't quite hit the same. Faris, Grace, and Martin were all proven to not be box office draws. Pratt was on ascent but still a few years away from being a household name. Teresa Palmer was better known but has never quite reached a high tier or notoriety. In other words, this movie is like an investment that you held onto for too long and sold low, finally admitting defeat, only to see it go right back up. 2011 was the worst time to release this movie. You know, had it been a good movie.
Sometimes there's a smaller aspect of a movie that gets in your head and poisons everything else about it for you. For me, that was figuring out how old these characters were supposed to be. From what I understand, this is set the summer after they graduate from college. Presumably, that means everyone should be about 22/23. Knowing it was shot in 2007, not 2010/11, helped some. That still means the ages are fairly off: Grace (29), Faris (31), Dan Fogler (31), Pratt (28), Palmer (21). What's weird is that the movie even has a 10-year reunion vibe to it. Everyone is way too established and successful already. Even the successful people would be at entry level jobs at 22, yet most of them act like they've been in their jobs for years. I know things have changed since the mid-80s, but I doubt it's that profoundly different. Late 20s makes so much more sense for everyone. Honestly, with all the 80s hair and costuming, Palmer isn't even that hard to believe aged-up. Because of this incongruency, I was distracted throughout the movie thinking, "Wait, these are 22-year-olds?" Before you give me the That 70s Show defense (and this was written by some writers of that show), pretty early on, that show wasn't about believing that anyone other than Mila Kunis could pass for how old they were supposed to be.
Another detail that really bothered me is that this is a "lazy college movie". That's a term I'm inventing for when a screenplay uses an obvious placeholder university then forgets to update it to something that better fits the tone of the movie later. Topher Grace graduated from MIT? I think what you mean is that he went to a prestigious school and has a lot of promise. How about we downgrade that to high school valedictorian with a free ride to, like, Vanderbilt? Anna Faris applies to Oxford for grad school? I think what you mean is that she applies to a grad school that would force her to movie a very far way away. How about NYU, or if you want to do a modicum of research, Iowa University? I get the desire to use school as shorthand, but without some calibration, it says the wrong thing. Grace graduated from MIT and works at a video store. He didn't even drop out. That's a level of fuck-up that's hard to root for.
It doesn't help that the movie isn't very funny on a joke level. The characters are causing a level of destruction that's hard to brush off with "oh, youth". And the part about Grace and Fogler getting out of grand theft auto and cocaine possession because Grace's dad is a cop hasn't aged well in the last decade.
This is an easy movie to watch. It's just not particularly good.
Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend
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