The blandly handsome Zac Ephron stars as a high school athlete who doesn't live up to his potential -- that is, he grows up to be Matthew Perry -- and so is magically transported back to high school. There he helps his own teenage children cope with life in a way that he couldn't as a grown-up. It's ineffectual, mostly because Ephron never seems to be anything but a nice kid who gets to be a nice kid all over again.
Starring: Zac Ephron, Matthew Perry, Leslie Mann, Thomas Lennon
Rating: 2 stars out of 5
Zac Ephron -- the David Cassidy of the 21st Century -- makes his grown-up movie breakout in 17 Again, a movie about a middle-aged guy who's disappointed in his life and magically becomes young again so he can return to high school and make things right.
There are a couple of interesting things about this concept. One is that it's the latest of what you might call the mulligan movies: films that give people the chance to do things over. Indeed, the previews before 17 Again feature Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, in which Matthew McConaughey gets to go back and do it right this time. There's even a scene in 17 Again, featuring a man jumping off a bridge, that salutes the granddaddy of the mulligans, It's A Wonderful Life, in which Jimmy Stewart sees how the world would be without him.
This concludes the "interesting things" portion of our review.
We now must talk about Zac Ephron, whom we meet in the first scene as Mike, a high school basketball star in 1989, shooting hoops with no shirt on and preening in the manner of both a high school athlete and a movie actor who is painfully aware of his own appeal: hey everyone, I'm acting. Nice pecs, huh?
The story has Mike giving up a promising athletic career to marry his pregnant sweetheart Scarlett (Leslie Mann as an adult). Flash forward to 20 years later, and Mike has grown up to be Matthew Perry, a bizarre turn of events that is another good reason to eat your vegetables and stay off the junk food. Older Mike is disillusioned with his life and he and Scarlett are about to get divorced.
Through the magic of clunky screenwriting, Mike gets to go back and become his young self in the present day. That is, he becomes Zac Ephron again, back in school and going to classes with his own children, Alex and Maggie (Sterling Knight and Michelle Trachtenberg).
Unlike, say, Back to the Future, where Michael J. Fox had to arrange for his own parents to meet, 17 Again doesn't have much for nice, handsome Mike to do except be nice, handsome Mike all over again. He's the only one who has gone back in time, so while he feels bad because he did the right thing -- he married the girl -- he doesn't get a second chance to do the wrong thing and dump her, which would be the film's logical conclusion.
Being Mike a second time means only being Zac Ephron a second time. There's nothing parental about him, or misplaced; he's just a cool kid in school, where he looks like he belongs. (High schoolgirl looking at Mike: "If that boy was an apple, he'd be a delicious.") This is something new from Hollywood, the fish-in-water comedy.
Mike has to help his son find self-confidence and rescue his daughter from a bad relationship with the school bully, but in Ephron's performance, it's all done by a prettified but strangely asexual kid who has none of the angst of a man in mid-life crisis who suddenly regains his youth. His main problems come in some creepy subplots: Mike's daughter seems to be falling for him and he himself is still attracted to his wife, who is also the mother of his school friend.
The comedy you don't get from intimations of incest and cougardom comes from Mike's friend Ned (Thomas Lennon), a high-school nerd now grown up to be a computer billionaire nerd, who quotes Lord of the Rings, speaks Elf language and decorates his house with medieval weaponry. He's the kind of boy-man you see only in the pictures and he adds a note of irritation the movie really doesn't need.
If this is Zac Ephron's breakout, buckle your seatbelts for High School Musical 9.
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