Zac Efron is the next Brad Pitt. That’s the thought that bolted through my brain about twenty minutes into 17 Again. And trust me, I was just as surprised as you are. But there he was, up there on the big screen, swaggering across a high school campus in a white T-shirt and skinny jeans with all the devil-may-care cool of a clean cut Tyler Durden.
Who was 17 again? Me.
Don’t get me wrong. Sandy brown hair and blue eyes do not a long-lived acting career make. If anything, Efron is going to have to work against his pretty-boy looks in the coming couple of years to get out from underneath the shadow of the High School Musical machine. And he doesn’t exactly start that work with 17 Again, a movie that is surely hoping to attract a few of the legions of devoted HSM fans. Within the first five minutes of the movie, Efron as Mike O’Donnell is dancing in a high school gym. Enough said.
But despite the fact that 17 Again is earnest, teenybopper fare, Efron has a kind of gravitas that suggests he is likely to make good on aspirations to graduate from Hollywood’s cinematic high school. That gravitas serves him well in this role as a 37-year-old man who finds himself back in his 17-year-old body.
Introduced to us in the guise of Matthew Perry, Mike O’Donnell is a bitter man who questions the choices that have shaped the last 20 years of his life. Chief among those choices was the decision to walk out of playing in a basketball game that would have secured him a college scholarship in order to follow Scarlet, his girlfriend who had just revealed she was pregnant. “You are my future. This baby is my future,” the young O’Donnell tells his bride-to-be. (Somewhere in Minnesota, Juno picks up her hamburger phone to make a snarky comment.) Twenty years later Mike tells his best friend Ned, with whom he’s crashing after being kicked out by Scarlet, that “I’m extremely disappointed with my life.” Got that, kids? Nuance is not the name of this game.
Ned is an uber nerd; when we meet him as an adult he is wearing prosthetic Vulcan ears and is eating his Cap’n Crunch out of a collectible Star Wars bowl. His fabulous wealth means that his bachelor pad is outfitted with all manner of fanboy memorabilia, including the light sabers, swords, and nunchucks he comically employs to fend off Mike when he shows up as a 17-year-old and appears to be an intruder.
Mike’s transformation from 37 to 17 takes place through movie magic most will find familiar (It’s A Wonderful Life meets Big meets Freaky Friday meets Back to the Future meets …), but Ned’s hypotheses are far more entertaining. As the quirky sidekick, Ned gets some of the best lines (often spoken in Elvish). And he will, inexplicably, get the girl.
Mike’s plan to use his newfound youth to take a second shot at the life he could have had quickly gives way to using his youth to look out for his two teenaged children, with whom he’s now a peer. With Ned posing as his dad, Mike enrolls in high school and becomes the new guy with a killer basketball game who makes all the girls swoon and has an oddly, “mature” take on behavior. Efron proves he can deliver a line when his threat to call a bully’s father made me laugh out loud.
Mike makes friends with his bullied son, Alex (Sterling Knight), and starts making trouble for the troublemaking boyfriend of his daughter, Maggie (Michelle Trachtenberg). And, most importantly perhaps, he reconnects with his estranged wife, Scarlet (Leslie Mann). All of these relationships put Mike in awkward situations, and much physical comedy comes from both trying to avoid the affections of his daughter and trying to stoke the same feelings in Scarlet.
Sex and fidelity are handled lightly, but are themes throughout 17 Again. The PG-13 rating reflects the way boys and girls objectify each other throughout the movie (typical of many movies aimed at teens). And there are several characters who demonstrate lax and even destructive attitudes about sex. A sex ed teacher suggests that asking high school seniors to abstain is “gross.” And a trio of Maggie’s girlfriends can’t wait for Mike to “disrespect” them. He tries to talk some fatherly sense into them, but throws up his hands. That said, the biggest revelations in 17 Again affirm the goodness of long-lasting love and family, and waiting for love (and perhaps even marriage) to have sex in the first place.
Most people have at least fantasized about what they would change if they could live certain parts of their lives over again. 17 Again indulges that fantasy and offers its own fantasy—that you wouldn’t want to change a thing, even if you could. And more importantly to this target audience, you get to watch Zac Efron be the hero of it all.
Next on Efron’s plate? A film called Me and Orson Welles with indie icon Richard Linklater. And if, in 25 years, Zac’s working steadily, getting acting award nominations here and there, and adopting children from countries around the world, just remember, I totally called it.
Talk About It
Discussion starters- The sex ed teacher said that it’s unrealistic to expect high school seniors to abstain from sex. Do you agree with this attitude? Why or why not?
- Do you think Mike should have married Scarlet at such a young age? Why or why not? What were the other options? Did he “throw his life away”?
- If you could be 17 again, what would you want to do differently?
The Family Corner
For parents to consider17 Again is rated PG-13 for language, some sexual material and teen partying. There is mild language throughout and depictions of teens trashing a house (alcohol is implied, but not shown). And though the movie doesn’t seem overwhelmingly about sex and there is no explicit content, innuendo is pervasive throughout the movie. Also, though the “magic” aspect of Mike’s transformation isn’t explored, the transformation is chalked up to the work of a “spirit guide.”
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