by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran Charles a movie from our DVD backlog that I picked
deliberately as a comic antidote to how dire the news has been lately: 17
Again, a supernatural farce from 2009
starring Zac Efron as a high-school basketball star in 1989, Mike O’Donnell,
who walks out of Hayden High’s big game just before it starts to have a
discussion with his girlfriend Scarlet (Allison Miller). We’re not told exactly
what they’re arguing about, but
eventually we get that Scarlet has just got pregnant by Mike, and so he decides
to “do the right thing” by walking out of the game and a potential college
scholarship, leaving the basketball bouncing around in mid-court as he settles
for a “normal” life, marries her and ends up in typical U.S. movie suburban
domesticity. The film then flashes forward 20 years, and Mike (Matthew Perry
from the cast of the inexplicably long-running TV sitcom Friends — who does not look like Zac Efron could grow up to be him, and frankly I’m not sure
it wouldn’t have been more believable if the filmmakers had artificially aged
Efron with makeup and/or CGI to play the older version of the character
himself) has just lost a double whammy: he’s been passed over for promotion on
his job (he’s a salesman for a drug company that has just introduced an
erectile dysfunction treatment — there’s a nice little gag at a sales meeting
when the staff try to work out a way to convince potential customers that
having an erection that lasts four hours or more is a good thing) in favor of a nubile young thing who’s just
been there two months (writer Jason Filardi — who’s quite good throughout the
movie at hinting at things
instead of spelling them out — doesn’t come right out and say that the boss
gave her the promotion over Mike because he’s either got into her pants or is
hoping to, but it’s pretty obvious) and his wife has decided to divorce him.
An
old Jewish-looking guy turns up as a janitor at Mike’s old high school and
introduces himself as Mike’s “spiritual advisor,” and later the old guy jumps
off a bridge in a driving rainstorm (Filardi and director Burr Steers — which
sounds like the name of a porn performer! — were obviously thinking Frank
Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life
here, only with rain instead of snow) and Mike dives in after him, whereupon
the old guy turns out to be a supernatural being with the power to revert Mike
to his high-school age so he can repeat his senior year (though in 2009, not
1989 — I had expected this movie to be more Back to the Future-ish than it was!) with a different outcome if that’s
what he wants. Mike approaches his friend Ned Gold (who appeared in the 1989
framing sequences as the Hayden High School basketball team’s water boy but in
the meantime has grown up to be an Internet gazillionaire and an inveterate
collector of fantasy-fiction memorabilia in general and props from The
Lord of the Rings and Star Wars in particular — Thomas Lennon plays the grown-up
incarnation of his character), who agrees to pose as the father of “Mark Gold”
to get the newly reverted (and back to being Zac Efron, of course!) Mike
O’Donnell into Hayden High. Only during the enrollment process Ned forms an
instant crush on the school’s principal, Jane Masterson (a quite nice
performance by Melora Hardin), though she puts him off by saying she never
dates students’ parents.
One irony is that “Mark” is attending the same high
school as his kids Maggie (Michelle Trachtenberg) and Alex (Sterling Knight),
and within the guise of an age-peer he’s still trying to give them fatherly
advice — especially when he finds out Maggie is dating the school bully, Stan
(Hunter Parrish — whom frankly I found sexier than Zac Efron, but then I found
Billy Zane hotter than Leonardo di Caprio when Charles and I saw Titanic and the next day we ran the video of Zane’s
superhero film The Phantom just
so I could see Zane play a good guy!), even though one of Stan’s principal
bullying targets is her brother Alex, whom we first meet after Stan has wrapped
him in duct tape and taped him to a toilet in the school restroom and “Mark”
has to get him out. There’s a quite nice scene in a sex-ed class in which the
teacher states that the official school policy is abstinence — which Mark
enthusiastically signs on to, especially since his daughter is in the class —
but the teacher says they grudgingly acknowledge that’s not possible given what
teenage hormones are, so she passes out a box of condoms to indicate that if
they’re going to have sex, they should at least do so safely. “Mark” virtuously
refuses the condoms, and he shames most of his classmates into doing so as
well, so Stan scoops them up, says “More for me!” and declares that the box
ought to last him one weekend. Maggie ultimately breaks up with Stan over his
insistence that they have sex when she really doesn’t want to, and she comes on
to “Mark” — who’s got the interesting problem of turning her down without
telling her the preposterous tale that he’s really her dad, artificially
regressed to his own teen days. He hems and haws about why they can’t date, and
not surprisingly she thinks he’s trying to tell her he’s Gay. (Wrong, though at
least half the Gay guys in the U.S. in 2009 probably wished Zac Efron were Gay!) Meanwhile, “Mark” has worked up
into the basketball team — as has Alex — which is still being coached by the
same person who did it in 1989 (Jim Gaffigan, who doesn’t look any older except
for a bit of a receding hairline) — and writer Filardi works his way up to a
parallel ending in which “Mark” once again walks away from the team on the eve
of a big game to be with Scarlet (a touching performance by Leslie Mann), as
the “spiritual adviser” appears to revert him to middle age.
Frankly, I was
reading so many comparisons to Damn Yankees in this film — also about a middle-aged man who is
reverted to his youth by a supernatural force but hangs around his wife because
he’s still in love with her even though she’s retained her natural age and
therefore looks twice as old as he — I was hoping Filardi would end it the same
way: “Mark” plays the big game, is reverted to his true age just before he has
to make the game-winning shot for his team, makes the shot anyway and then
disappears — but I still liked the movie. Though I said early on I’d probably
have liked it better if it had been made as a silent in the 1920’s and Harold
Lloyd had been the star, it had a nice charm and was amusing throughout even
though only rarely was it out-and-out hilarious. I also liked that Ned Gold and
Principal Masterson got together after all, bonding over their mutual
appreciation of The Lord of the Rings and even speaking Elvish to each other over a dinner date (though they
referred to the language as “Elf”) and ending up together in a
preposterous-looking bed that resembles a Corvette car — and there was a nice
worm-turning scene in which, to celebrate a win for the basketball team, “Mark”
invites all his school friend to a party at his “dad”’s place while Ned and
Masterson are on their date, only Ned comes home unexpectedly and, when he
can’t get the kids who are playing with all his treasured Star Wars memorabilia to leave, Principal Masterson assumes
her tough-disciplinarian role and does it for him. Charles, like me, liked 17
Again better than he’d expected to, and
particularly liked the way Zac Efron’s role stretched his talents as an actor
instead of just letting his hair, his baby face and his pecs do his acting for
him.
