17 Again
I have a weakness for the Freaky Friday body-switching comedies, which this is not, despite appearances. Nor is it a rehash of Big. It’s more of a male fantasy than even that. A wise older cynic gets to be hot and seventeen years old again and fix everything in his present-day life? Suh-weet. It’s more like It’s A Wonderful Life crossed with a Christmas Carol, with a soupçon of Never Been Kissed, or maybe a pinch of reverse 13 Going on 30. Who, at some point, hasn’t had the fantasy of going back to do our youth over (all of it, or just a key moment or two), but with our adult wisdom and experience? Or, at the very least, get to see your feet when you look down AND eat a whole pizza in one sitting without regretting it the next day.
Zac Efron plays the young Mike O’Donnell, who in the 1980’s married his knocked up high school sweetheart to do the right thing. Today, as their divorce closes in on finalized, and his job and kids is slipping away from him, adult Mike (a hangdog Matthew Perry, looking like he walked every inch of this guy’s pains) is stuck. He is one of those former superstars who peaked in high school and then made one massive huge mistake. His late-blooming turbo nerd best friend Tyler Steelman-cum-Thomas Lennon, the one who flew his freak flag and followed his bliss, blossomed into an incredibly rich if socially backward guy.
Having a stud like Efron be BFFs with Steelman shows how freaking awesomely nice Mike-Efron is on top of being athletically talented, popular, and virile. Having Perry still be friends with Lennon years later bespeaks narrative convenience more than anything else, or of course the sympathetic goodness of persecuted nerds when one of the mighty have fallen. Either way, what a great cast! Lennon is adorable and charming as the wealthy nerd who can indulge his every childhood dream; Efron has to be the grown-up sometimes, but Lennon’s arrested development lets them both be kids too. Leslie Mann as grown-up Mrs. O’Donnell, and Melora Hardin, as the principal of the O’Donnell’s high school (past and present) get to be funny in their own right even as straight men to the fantasy boys.
So Perry runs into old-school-bucket-toting janitor Brian Doyle Murray (who might as well have had a name tag that reads CLARENCE) and one thing leads to another and Zac Efron is back, in the here and now, agonizingly toned and mesmerizngly twinkly. It’s not really clear what this is meant to achieve; Wonderful Life and Carol both explore life with different choices; Efron gets to be a brand new human being infected with an older human being’s baggage, and somehow he’s meant to fix…something. It makes no administrative sense. He spends too much of the movie trying to justify this unjustifiable transformation, but it’s hard to mind when Efron is so dang diddly adorable. It’s a movie, they make it work, sometimes it’s a little forced, sometimes it leads to unexpectedly sweet and funny moments. Sometimes it leads to odd cougar-baiting or too-long adult-voice lectures about abstinence and waiting for marriage, but his life was ruined by an unplanned pregnancy so you can appreciate his feeling on that – but it kind of….feels creepy.
Efron has never been full-on adorable to me until this movie (even in Hairspray he was just cuteish) but wow, I totally get it now. Those eyes! Those cheekbones! That belly! The movie is pretty shameless in its lust for Efron, but I didn’t see any of the grinning faces in the audience complaining. He manages to carry the older man’s wisdom in his eyes despite his dewy skin and…what was I saying? 17 Again manages to be very sweet and romantic for the most part, and despite the fetishizing of living in the past, it really more about being responsible for one’s choices and grateful for what one has. I’m glad I’m not 17 Again, but I was glad to see Efron get another shot at it.
MPAA Rating PG-13
Release date 4/17/09
Time in minutes 102
Director Burr Steers
Studio New Line
