Senior Year

Directed by Alex Hardcastle, Senior Year follows popular ’90s high-schooler Stephanie Conway (Angourie Rice) as she falls into a decades-long coma after a cheerleading stunt gone wrong – with the bulk of the picture detailing the now-grownup Stephanie’s (Rebel Wilson) modern-day exploits. It’s a seemingly foolproof setup that’s squandered virtually from the word go by Hardcastle, as the filmmaker, working from Andrew Knauer, Arthur Pielli, and Brandon Scott Jones’ screenplay, delivers a sluggish and terminally unfunny comedy that rarely, if ever, exploits its larger-than-life premise – with, for example, the almost total lack of fish-out-of-water elements ranking high on the picture’s list of misguided, misbegotten attributes. (The older Stephanie’s bizarre lack of shock at contemporary cellphones is rather indicative of the movie’s wrongheaded approach.) The arms-length atmosphere is compounded by Wilson’s annoying, grating performance and a narrative that grows more and more generic and bland as time progresses (ie the movie’s second half seems to have emerged directly from a template for high-school comedies), which, when coupled with an absolutely interminable (and completely ineffective) third act, cements Senior Year‘s place as an aggressively overlong and mostly unwatchable trainwreck that could (and should) have been so much better.

* out of ****