If you could do it all over again, would you do it differently? Darn right you would. Especially if you were a rising basketball star with scholarship prospects and a bright future that you let dribble away, because you foolishly got your girlfriend pregnant and did the right thing by marrying her. Choices, that 20 years later, see you on the verge of divorce, estranged from your family and in a dead-end job.
That’s the position in which Class of 1989 hero, Mike O’Donnell (played by Zac Efron at age 17, and Matthew Perry at age 37) finds himself in 17 Again. Mike’s older Perry-incarnation is a loser, girlfriend-turned-wife Scarlet (Leslie Mann) has kicked him out and the kids’ attitude (Sterling Knight and Michelle Trachtenberg) screams ‘dysfunctional family’. His only friend is Ned (Thomas Lennon), the high school nerd who is still a nerd — albeit an obscenely rich one, able to indulge his every desire for Star Wars toys.
A leprechaun-like janitor who happens to be lurking about sends Mike back to his 17-year-old self. But he doesn’t go 20 years back in time so he can — at the very least — practice safe sex. Rather, he becomes a 30-something-year-old in a 17-year-old body in the Class of 2009. To make things more awkward, his teen son and daughter are studying in the same school.
The film, directed by Burr Steers from a screenplay by Jason Filardi, could have taken a shot at doing something thought-provoking or even just goofy with the tired body-switching device. But 17 Again is out to punch some conventionally correct buttons: i.e., the life lesson that Mike must learn is to accept responsibility as a dad and keep his family together.
The camera lingers on the almost-too-beautiful Efron with barely-contained delight as he goes through the motions of learning this lesson. After all, he’s the sole reason why the film has been made: to please his teen/teen fan base and also start drawing in an older crowd. To be fair, Efron doesn’t strut — he’s natural onscreen and easy-to-like. He even manages to find something in the script to make his own, and plays a 30-something dad in a teen body rather charmingly.
The problem isn’t Efron, it’s the script that doesn’t know what to do with him. So there’s some banal slapstick thrown in such as girls in Mike’s class — whose vibe is more pole dancer in a strip club than student — slapping him sequentially. Or there’s Mike getting beaten up by his daughter’s boyfriend — whose vibe is more psychopaths in search of a crime than bad-news boyfriend. The latter is, of course, a clear “sign” that Mike’s been neglectful of his fatherly duties and needs to save his daughter; however, you’re not allowed to question what mama Scarlet was doing through all of this.
And as to the question of how you’d live your life differently if you were 17 again, this isn’t the film that’s going to give you the lowdown.
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