What's my age again?
Like many comedic actors, Rebel Wilson has fallen into a schtick and can't get up. This is not her fault. 2011's Bridesmaids and 2012's Pitch Perfect, both of which featured her in incandescent side roles, were a hell of a one-two punch to get a career going. Her deadpan, brutally honest characterizations are and were genuinely funny, but they were able to shine because they were attached to characters upon whom the emotional core of the plot did not rely. Movies that have positioned her as the lead or co-lead like Isn't It Romantic and The Hustle have been rare, and only intermittently successful, because too heavy of a dose of a schtick that potent can be bad for the health. This proves to be true with her newest vehicle, the Netflix original comedy Senior Year, but at the very least she is allowing a whole heap of supporting cast members their very own Rebel Wilson moments.
The plot is a pretty natural extension of the "grown person goes back to school" subgenre. It's 2002 and cheer captain Stephanie (Angourie Rice) only has one goal: live a perfect life. To her that means winning prom queen and taking up in her dream house with her hunky boyfriend Blaine (Tyler Barnhardt), though her dorky best friends Martha (Molly Brown) and Seth (Zaire Adams) don't like how they were thrown by the wayside to help make these dreams a reality. When Queen Bee Tiffany (Ana Yi Puig) pulls a prank that is Carrie-level sociopathic, Stephanie suffers a blow to the head and... wakes up in 2022, played by Rebel Wilson.
It turns out she has been in a coma for two decades, and she quickly decides the only way to get her life back on track is to finish her senior year of high school. Martha (now Mary Holland), is the school's principal, and Seth (now Sam Richardson) is the librarian who still harbors his childhood crush on Stephanie. Tiffany (now Zoe Chao) is married to Blaine (now Justin Hartley) and living in Stephanie's dream house. The school is now ruled by Tiffany's daughter, social media influencer Bri (Jade Bender) and Bri's boyfriend Lance (Michael Cimino - the one from Love, Victor, not the late director of The Deer Hunter). Stephanie hatches a plan to win prom queen once again, and she may or may not learn the ways that her original plan was flawed and unrealistic in an actual adult environment.
As mentioned above, Senior Year has a heap of tremendously funny supporting performances. This is because it's got a really deep bench of supporting cast members, probably on account of how goddamn long this nearly two-hour film is. You take the good with the bad. The MVP is probably Mary Holland, who has turned her excellent supporting performance in Hulu's Happiest Season into a veritable comedy empire across various streaming services. Every character she plays is off-kilter in some way, but she has a keen ability to harness her inherent brittleness and reimagine it into a variety of different physical and vocal performances that serve the needs of whatever project she's in, and she delivers what is probably the film's one genuine emotional moment on top of that.
She's not alone, though! Sam Richardson isn't taxing himself, but he uses his charming, self-deprecating humor to breathe life into one of the genre's most desperately uninteresting stock characters. Justin Hartley also proves to have a genuinely sharp sense of comic timing that he's only really had the chance to share with the world in the underrated A Bad Moms Christmas. He delivers two of the film's funniest moments, one in a deliciously unpredictable line reading, the other in a similarly zany unexpected moment of physical comedy. Zoe Chao and Jordan Bender also make a great team, delivering a series of hilariously mean barbs in the perfect sugar-coated mean girl tone, and both Hartley and Michael Cimino play off of them well as the exact kind of dopey himbo they know they can rule over with ease.
It's a blessing that the cast is so stacked with interesting personages, because Rebel Wilson is coasting so hard that they've built a Six Flags park around her. She's doing her thing, as she was presumably asked to do, but she fails to draw much that is worthwhile from the well of diminished returns. She is also clearly stuck in Judd Apatow improv mode here, so all of the scenes that lean the hardest on her feel aimless and confused. Pitch Perfect also clearly taught her that adding a sex word to any phrase is a recipe for instant comedy, but I regret to inform her that saying "I fell down like a bag of dicks" is only really funny if your sense of vulgarity hasn't progressed beyond age 12. The script also loads her up with references to modern pop culture that actively work against the way Stephanie still knows so little about 2022 (she calls a USB drive a "computer tampon" at an extremely late point in the movie, and yet she can effortlessly spout jokes about OnlyFans).
The film at least makes some brief feints at a unifying aesthetic in the opening act, though it really only indulges in what has become the Netflix high school movie house style of painting big blocks of text on the frame. There is also a music video dream sequence halfway through that could have been pleasant if it wasn't eight times as long as it should have been. Unfortunately, this creative energy experiences a sharp dip after that point, and the only visual schema we're given subsequently is the alarming inability of the shitty digital cameras they're using to capture background lighting well without haloing, posterizing, or otherwise doing things that have no business being visible in a professional cinematic offering.
Once the aesthetic goes to shit, all one is left with is the script, which is so confident in how boilerplate it is that it doesn't commit to consistency with any character or plotline. It gets so muddled and unclear in its goals that it goes on for a solid 25 minutes past the point where the story ends, a truly hellish experience somewhat akin to being buried alive. There is enough material here to recommend it, but only to people who have a tough skin for Netflix originals and desire something to be playing in the background so they're not playing Wordle on their couch in complete silence.
Brennan Klein is a millennial who knows way more about 80's slasher movies than he has any right to. He's a former host of the Attack of the Queerwolf podcast and a current senior movie/TV news writer at Screen Rant. You can find his other reviews on his blog Popcorn Culture. Follow him on Twitter or Letterboxd, if you feel like it.
The plot is a pretty natural extension of the "grown person goes back to school" subgenre. It's 2002 and cheer captain Stephanie (Angourie Rice) only has one goal: live a perfect life. To her that means winning prom queen and taking up in her dream house with her hunky boyfriend Blaine (Tyler Barnhardt), though her dorky best friends Martha (Molly Brown) and Seth (Zaire Adams) don't like how they were thrown by the wayside to help make these dreams a reality. When Queen Bee Tiffany (Ana Yi Puig) pulls a prank that is Carrie-level sociopathic, Stephanie suffers a blow to the head and... wakes up in 2022, played by Rebel Wilson.
It turns out she has been in a coma for two decades, and she quickly decides the only way to get her life back on track is to finish her senior year of high school. Martha (now Mary Holland), is the school's principal, and Seth (now Sam Richardson) is the librarian who still harbors his childhood crush on Stephanie. Tiffany (now Zoe Chao) is married to Blaine (now Justin Hartley) and living in Stephanie's dream house. The school is now ruled by Tiffany's daughter, social media influencer Bri (Jade Bender) and Bri's boyfriend Lance (Michael Cimino - the one from Love, Victor, not the late director of The Deer Hunter). Stephanie hatches a plan to win prom queen once again, and she may or may not learn the ways that her original plan was flawed and unrealistic in an actual adult environment.
As mentioned above, Senior Year has a heap of tremendously funny supporting performances. This is because it's got a really deep bench of supporting cast members, probably on account of how goddamn long this nearly two-hour film is. You take the good with the bad. The MVP is probably Mary Holland, who has turned her excellent supporting performance in Hulu's Happiest Season into a veritable comedy empire across various streaming services. Every character she plays is off-kilter in some way, but she has a keen ability to harness her inherent brittleness and reimagine it into a variety of different physical and vocal performances that serve the needs of whatever project she's in, and she delivers what is probably the film's one genuine emotional moment on top of that.
She's not alone, though! Sam Richardson isn't taxing himself, but he uses his charming, self-deprecating humor to breathe life into one of the genre's most desperately uninteresting stock characters. Justin Hartley also proves to have a genuinely sharp sense of comic timing that he's only really had the chance to share with the world in the underrated A Bad Moms Christmas. He delivers two of the film's funniest moments, one in a deliciously unpredictable line reading, the other in a similarly zany unexpected moment of physical comedy. Zoe Chao and Jordan Bender also make a great team, delivering a series of hilariously mean barbs in the perfect sugar-coated mean girl tone, and both Hartley and Michael Cimino play off of them well as the exact kind of dopey himbo they know they can rule over with ease.
It's a blessing that the cast is so stacked with interesting personages, because Rebel Wilson is coasting so hard that they've built a Six Flags park around her. She's doing her thing, as she was presumably asked to do, but she fails to draw much that is worthwhile from the well of diminished returns. She is also clearly stuck in Judd Apatow improv mode here, so all of the scenes that lean the hardest on her feel aimless and confused. Pitch Perfect also clearly taught her that adding a sex word to any phrase is a recipe for instant comedy, but I regret to inform her that saying "I fell down like a bag of dicks" is only really funny if your sense of vulgarity hasn't progressed beyond age 12. The script also loads her up with references to modern pop culture that actively work against the way Stephanie still knows so little about 2022 (she calls a USB drive a "computer tampon" at an extremely late point in the movie, and yet she can effortlessly spout jokes about OnlyFans).
The film at least makes some brief feints at a unifying aesthetic in the opening act, though it really only indulges in what has become the Netflix high school movie house style of painting big blocks of text on the frame. There is also a music video dream sequence halfway through that could have been pleasant if it wasn't eight times as long as it should have been. Unfortunately, this creative energy experiences a sharp dip after that point, and the only visual schema we're given subsequently is the alarming inability of the shitty digital cameras they're using to capture background lighting well without haloing, posterizing, or otherwise doing things that have no business being visible in a professional cinematic offering.
Once the aesthetic goes to shit, all one is left with is the script, which is so confident in how boilerplate it is that it doesn't commit to consistency with any character or plotline. It gets so muddled and unclear in its goals that it goes on for a solid 25 minutes past the point where the story ends, a truly hellish experience somewhat akin to being buried alive. There is enough material here to recommend it, but only to people who have a tough skin for Netflix originals and desire something to be playing in the background so they're not playing Wordle on their couch in complete silence.
Brennan Klein is a millennial who knows way more about 80's slasher movies than he has any right to. He's a former host of the Attack of the Queerwolf podcast and a current senior movie/TV news writer at Screen Rant. You can find his other reviews on his blog Popcorn Culture. Follow him on Twitter or Letterboxd, if you feel like it.
Categories: netflix originals
