Teen sex comedy explores gender equality
Geraldine Viswanathan and Gideon Adlon as Julie, Kayla and Sam, who have been best friends since kindergarten. In the other corner, we have Leslie Mann, John Cena and Ike Barinholtz as Lisa, Mitchell and Hunter, the parents thrown together by default when their kids befriended each other.
“Blockers” gets off to a rocky start. The character backstories essentially don’t exist and their relationships are confusing. The story is marked by a confluence of conveniently timed reveals — prom falls on a school day, and Julie receives her acceptance letter to UCLA that afternoon. It feels forced and doesn’t find its rhythm until the prom begins and the parents hop into a minivan to stop the sex pact.
Although the idea of parents hysterically trying to stop their 18-year-old daughters from “losing their innocence” seems like a retrograde notion, “Blockers” takes care to include the counterargument that’s a far more modern approach to sexuality and gender equality. Mitchell’s wife, Marcie (Sarayu Blue) — the only seemingly sensible adult — argues their girls should be allowed to explore their sexuality on their own terms. Those moments, though shoehorned in, are crucial for the film to work.
It takes awhile to rev up, but “Blockers” is often laugh-out-loud funny, thanks to the cast — you just wish they all had a little more to work with. Mann plays the overly attached mom with a penchant for strangely detailed stories, and WWE star Cena fully steps into his own as a comedic actor and steals the show. He’s shown his faculty for comedy in “Trainwreck” and “Sisters,” and he has a gift for delivery and timing. As the straightlaced superdad, he’s often the butt of the joke (literally during a chugging contest).
The breakout stars of “Blockers” are easily Viswanathan and Adlon. Watching Viswanathan inhabit the self-possessed, supremely confident Kayla is like seeing Emma Stone for the first time in “Superbad.” We watch her become a movie star on screen, and the comic chemistry she shares with Cena, who plays her dad, always coaching her to be the best she can be is the best part of “Blockers.”
This raunchy teen-sex comedy radically places teen girls in the driver’s seat of their own sexual agency, but it never sacrifices the dumb, weird or gross moments that make the genre what it is — for better or for worse.