17 AGAIN (Burr Steers 2009)

[Chris Knipp]

Burr Steers: 17 AGAIN (2009)

Out of body, out of mind

Review by Chris Knipp

Zac Efron has entered the body-change movie genre with 17 Again. Wouldn't you like to return to high school as Zac? Well, maybe you wouldn't. Maybe even Zac wouldn't. By now he may really be just about done with high school. The 22-year-old High School Musical veteran has expressed an understandable desire to work with serious directors now. He's got to break away from the HSM mold somehow, and this romantic comedy is a start. It isn't much of a start. But this vehicle has the virtue as a new page in Mr. Efron's CV that without him it clearly would be nothing. You watch it for him, and the rest is dross. The thing is, he really is watchable, and for every female in the audience, especially the younger ones, he's catnip. That tan skin; that glittering smile; those sparkling blue eyes; that artfully tousled hair! He's a people-pleaser who can really please.

Burr Steers’s movie begins with Mike O'Donnell, now a dejected 37-year-old man (played by Matthew Perry) who's being divorced by his high school sweetheart (Leslie Mann). It seems that twenty years ago Mike was a high school senior just about to be picked for a basketball scholarship when he ran off the court to marry his pregnant girlfriend. The basketball scout crossed his name of the list. He never went to college and his life gradually left its zest. He makes good money but feels humiliated at his job. He's lost interest in his marriage and his wife has lost interest in him.

But then, somehow or other, through a janitor who becomes his "spiritual guide," Mike is given the opportunity to drop twenty years, to re-enter his supple, handsome, hoop-dream body. Mike's pal Ned (Thomas Lennon) pretends to be his dad and takes him, now transformed into Zac, to enroll in his old high school. It's a chance to go back to that moment on the basketball court and do it differently--a theme that blends elements of Back to the Future and It's a Wonderful Life. Needless to add that the body-change idea has been worked more notably in movies like Big and Freaky Friday. But there's always a new body to change into, and a new gimmick to go with it.

This time the gimmick is that that the grownup Mike's two kids are students at the old high school now, and so the now 17-again Mike finds son Alex (Sterling Knight) is being mercilessly hazed and is a basketball talent but needs a push to join the team, while Maggie (Michelle Trachtenberg) is dating a predatory jock who cannot be trusted. Things turn tricky when both Scarlett (Leslie Mann, Judd Apatow's wife in real life), the adult Mike's disgruntled spouse, who could be his mother (how weird is that?) and Maggie, who's his daughter but looks now like his sister (how weird is that?) both fall for the irresistible Zac--the now transformed Mike. Credit is due to writer Jason Filardi and Steers for keeping this from becoming icky. After all, it is classic stuff from Shakespearean comedy, where disguises make characters fall in love with the wrong person. It's just that incest isn't too funny.

The challenge for Zac is ostensibly to communicate the presence of a 37-year-old jaded husband and irate dad inside a 17-year-old. In the event, his behavior just seems pretty odd at times, but he still never stops being Zac. Luckily that works, because despite the blandness of Zac's "scrubbed young mannishness," as Interview aptly put it in a recent cover story, Zac is indeed "an entertainer in the most traditional sense of the word." He sings, he dances, he shoots hoops, he "winks at the girls and nods at the guys." He works the room (or the screen), and you believe him: his charm is unflagging and reaches out to everybody. Even to you.

There are, however, some non-Zac things in this movie that I just did not get. Why is it that the adult Mike, Matthew Perry, is still around, and compares notes with the Zac-ed up Mike from time to time? How does that work, exactly? And what on earth is the point of the annoying subplot of Ned, who meets the principal when he goes in to enroll Zac, falls for her, dates her in series of embarrassing scenes and they turn out to be fellow Lord of the Rings freaks (or something)? Thomas Lennon's fey gaucherie left me completely cold and did not advance the body-transformation story one iota.

Another big question is how Burr Steers, who made the very sly and darkly witty youth comedy Igby Goes Down, wind up making something as bland and conventional as this? May both he and Zac do better next time.