‘Beach Movie’ a shore thing
Creating the next Disney movie phenomenon feels a bit like baking a cake from a mix. If the formula is followed, the outcome will be airy and sweet.
“Teen Beach Movie,” premiering Friday, July 19, on Disney Channel, is a mash-up of 1950s surfers and bikers. It has chaste romances, energetic choreography and peppy songs. It also has time travel and a cartoonish villain.
Seventeen months ago on Governor’s Beach in Fajardo, Puerto Rico, the cast rehearsed as iguanas scuttled under trailers, and blackbirds screeched. The plot has the plucky heroine, Mack (Maia Mitchell, “The Fosters”), happily living with her grandfather. She loves to surf with her boyfriend, Brady (Ross Lynch, “Austin & Ally”).
Her aunt arrives to whisk her away to a preppy school. Mack feels obligated to live up to expectations. In her diary, Mack’s late mother wrote: “I dream my daughter becomes a great success, that she isn’t just pulled through life but marches through it triumphantly.”
Resigned to leaving paradise, Mack defiantly must catch one more wave during a fast-approaching storm. She goes under. Brady tries to save her. When they resurface, it’s 1962.
If that’s not enough of a leap, they wind up in Brady’s favorite movie, “Wet Side Story,” where members of a bike club, the Rodents, and surfers squabble. There’s no real violence.
There is, however, a teen idol, Tanner (Garrett Clayton), and with a name like that, he’s naturally a surfer. The movie has fun with his goldenboy glam; when Tanner smiles, his teeth twinkle, like in a toothpaste ad.
“The hair, makeup and wardrobe make me look like a crazy Ken doll,” Clayton says.
Tanner and Lela (Grace Phipps, “Vampire Diaries”) like each other, but her brother is leader of the Rodents, so they’re supposed to be enemies.
Mack, an independent teen of today, has a hard time with 1962’s gender stereotypes. She tells the broadly drawn biker girls, “It’s your life. Why can’t you decide?”
“She is the voice of feminism in the movie,” Mitchell says. “She is a very spontaneous person. The very idea that girls are not equal to guys, and girls are not as good as surfers is offensive to her.”