Can’t Hardly Wait

Directed by Harry Elfont and Deborah Kaplan, Can’t Hardly Wait follows an assortment of disparate high schoolers, including Ethan Embry’s Preston, Jennifer Love Hewitt’s Amanda, and Seth Green’s Kenny, as they assemble at a wild party and weave in and out of each other’s lives. Filmmakers Elfont and Kaplan, armed with their own screenplay, deliver a mostly entertaining endeavor that benefits from the top-notch, charismatic efforts of its various performers, and it’s clear, certainly, that the somewhat plotless narrative doesn’t, as a result, become nearly as problematic as one might’ve feared – with folks like Embry, Hewitt, and Green turning in entertainment work that’s more than matched by such scene-stealing periphery players as Charlie Korsmo, Peter Facinelli, and Donald Faison. (Lauren Ambrose, cast as the acerbic Denise Fleming, offers up the picture’s most memorable, ingratiating turn, ultimately.) And while the movie is perhaps not quite as impactful as Elfont and Kaplan have intended, Can’t Hardly Wait, which boasts its fair share of memorable sequences and set-pieces, builds towards a satisfying closing stretch that confirms its place as an above-average teen comedy.

*** out of ****