Senior Year is a lighthearted comedy with a few decent chuckles. In most cases that would be enough. The problem comes in how it deals with its premise.
Steph (Rebel Wilson) is involved in a cheerleadering accident that leaves her comatose for 20 years. When she wakes up she's 37, but from her perspective she was 17 only hours before.
This tragic premise was an opportunity to centre the movie around heart, empathy, and the struggle of helping someone in an impossible situation. The majority of jokes could have stayed in, but this underlying theme could have brought depth and compassion to the characters, particularly in the third act.
Instead, the characters around Steph insist that she "grow up" and start acting like an adult, something she fundamentally hasn't had time to become. Not even the most reasonable and caring characters bother to empathise with her extremely difficult situation, resulting in every one of them feeling like a shallow, self-absorbed husk, no matter how the script struggles to convince us otherwise.
There's a deep sense of both horror and tragedy in the premise of Senior Year that could have been leveraged to craft a movie with true depth and heart, but is instead treated as a shallow setup for a standard story of a protagonist stuck in the past.
Steph (Rebel Wilson) is involved in a cheerleadering accident that leaves her comatose for 20 years. When she wakes up she's 37, but from her perspective she was 17 only hours before.
This tragic premise was an opportunity to centre the movie around heart, empathy, and the struggle of helping someone in an impossible situation. The majority of jokes could have stayed in, but this underlying theme could have brought depth and compassion to the characters, particularly in the third act.
Instead, the characters around Steph insist that she "grow up" and start acting like an adult, something she fundamentally hasn't had time to become. Not even the most reasonable and caring characters bother to empathise with her extremely difficult situation, resulting in every one of them feeling like a shallow, self-absorbed husk, no matter how the script struggles to convince us otherwise.
There's a deep sense of both horror and tragedy in the premise of Senior Year that could have been leveraged to craft a movie with true depth and heart, but is instead treated as a shallow setup for a standard story of a protagonist stuck in the past.