GUILTY PLEASURES
Blockers is raunchy and ridiculous, but it will keep audiences laughing
There is nothing weirder than imagining your parents having sex — unless it’s imagining your children having sex. Most people are content to believe on some level that both they and their grandkids came about through some sort of immaculate conception. (Why else do we call them little angels?)
Not so the latest gross-out comedy, directed by first-timer Kay Cannon but bearing the unmistakable marks — let’s be gracious and call them fingerprints — of producers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (Sausage Party), as well as the people behind American Pie and the Harold & Kumar movies.
The premise? Three teens, played by Kathryn Newton, Geraldine Viswanathan and Gideon Adlon, decide they’re going to lose their virginity on prom night. This in spite of the fact that one of them barely knows the object of her crush, and another would rather sleep with a girl.
Anyway, several parents get wind of this plan — curse the cloud! — and set off to stop it. Leslie Mann is the single mom who regrets her own youthful choices and doesn’t want her daughter to repeat them. Ike Barinholtz has figured out his daughter is gay, while John Cena just hates the smirk on the guy his daughter is looking to bed. So they’ve all got reasons that would hold up in court, or at least in movie court. (Judge Reinhold presiding.)
It’s all pretty silly — there’s actually a line in which Barinholtz declares things “stupid and ridiculous,” and I was inclined to agree — but the litmus test of comedy is if makes you laugh, and Blockers did it for me and a large part of the audience at a recent promotional screening. We weren’t proud of ourselves, but guilty guffaws still count.
And there’s much giggling to be had at the characters’ expense, beginning with the contrast between Barinholtz’s five o’clock shadow, Cena’s six o’clock haircut and Mann’s ’50s wardrobe.
There’s also something refreshing about a film that gives three young women their own sexdriven storyline, although it’s hardly the first (see Aubrey Plaza in 2013’s The To Do List), and it won’t win any prizes for social realism; the boys are so bland, sexless and harmless that if the film had a hashtag it would be #MeNeither.
But aside from a few tossedoff platitudes, co-writers Brian and Jim Kehoe don’t seem to be trying to corner the market on the authentic teen experience. They’re more interested in having Mann try to Vin Diesel her vehicle into stopping her runaway daughter. (Her delivery of “The car just exploded!” is a flat line reading for the ages.) And in placing the trio of hapless grownups in flagrante delicto, the delictum in question being the neighbours playing a game I’ve decided to call Blind Man’s Buff.
It’s R-rated fun for the whole mature family. In fact, the biggest omission is that there is no line at the end of the credits, promising that the filmmakers will never attempt to make a sequel featuring the grandparents trying to keep someone from getting busy. Nothing could block my laughter more quickly.