FINISHING SCHOOL (SENIOR YEAR)

There are some movie concepts that just make me groan.

Action stars fronting comedies where they have to look after toddlers are very much in that bracket.

Comedies or dramas featuring animals, usually dogs, as the narrator are another one.

Pretty much at the top, though, are comedies where adult characters are forced to go back to high school.

Think of Rodney Dangerfield in the imaginatively titled 'Back to School' - actually try not to.

Or Adam Sandler mugging his way through 'Billy Madison'.

Now you can add Rebel Wilson to the list.

'Senior Year' on Netflix finds the Australian's 37 year old Stephanie Conway going back to school after spending 20 years in a coma.

Directed by Alex Hardcastle, the younger version of Stephanie, played by fellow Australian Angourie Rice, is an immigrant from Down Under who sets about becoming the most popular student at high school after being humiliated on her 14th birthday at a bowling alley because her friends are too nerdy.

While Stephanie doesn't completely jettison Zaire Adams' Seth Novacelik and Molly Brown's Martha Reiser, she plots a path to popularity, joining the cheerleaders and landing Tyler Barnhardt's high school hunk Blaine Balbo.

This puts her in the crosshairs, though, of Ana Yi Puig's Tiffany Blanchette who is fuming that Blaine ditched her for Stephanie.

While Stephanie dreams of being the Prom Queen, Tiffany undermines her at every opportunity, organising rival events.

While both of them are taking part in a cheerleader routine, Tiffany engineers it that some of their colleagues stand back while Stephanie is tossed into the air and let her fall.

She crashes to the gym floor and winds up in a coma, waking up as Rebel Wilson's version of Stephanie 20 years later.

Still very much a 17 year old in her head, she looks in the mirror and thinks a grown woman is aping her every move.

But quickly wrapping her head around the fact that she just missed her twenties and much of her thirties, she catches sight of Justin Hartley's grown up Blaine and reconnects with Sam Richardson's Seth and Mary Holland's Martha who work in the high school - the latter is the principal.

Blaine has married Zoey Chao's Tiffany and is living in the dream house of a former Prom Queen, Alicia Silverstone's Deanna Russo that Stephanie idolised.

Rather unconvincingly, Stephanie talks her widowed father, Chris Parnell's Jim Conway and Martha into allowing her complete the last month of high school.

However under Martha's rule, Harding High is a very different school.

There is no prom and the cheerleaders are no longer the popular students and forbidden from doing risque routines.

The most popular student is Jade Bender's Bri, who just happens to be Tiffany and Blaine's daughter.

Still intent on becoming popular, Stephanie uses social media and a risque dance routine to go viral.

But in her pursuit of this goal, she finds herself in a renewed battle with Tiffany and also learns some home truths about her obsession and its impact on those around her.

'Senior Year' isn't the worst movie you will probably see this year.

However it won't be far off.

Flatly directed by Englishman Alex Hardcastle, it shows little imagination and has a terribly dull script by Andrew Knauer, Arthur Pielli and Brandon Scott Jones.

It's hard to root for a character as shallow as Stephanie, despite Wilson and Rice's best efforts.

The film also feels lacking in authenticity.

It comes nowhere near the insight and comic sharpness of Tina Fey's screenplay for Mark Waters' 'Mean Girls'.

References to how Lady GaGa has supplanted Madonna and the popularity of Instagram feel like adult writers cackhandedly attempting to get down with the kids.

And the points Knauer, Pielli and Scott Jones try to make about the teenage obsession with popularity and also modern day wokeness in the education system are just muddled.

Wilson overacts the way she normally does - pulling faces and generally gooning about.

Given the concept of a 17 year old mind in a 37 year old's body, she spectacularly fails to grasp the comic potential of such a situation.

When you compare her performance to Tom Hanks' as a boy in a man's body in 'Big' or the adult in a teen's body routine of Kathleen Turner in 'Peggy Sue Got Married,' it is very unimaginative and low energy.

However it's difficult to see how our a script as inane as this could inspire anyone to bring their A game to the project and as a result, the rest of the cast just turn up, do their bit and get paid.

The film's biggest failing, of course, is that it is relentlessly unfunny which is criminal for any comedy.

Jokes about penises and stiff socks are lame and sit awkwardly alongside moments of supposed drama where the characters get to emote.

A sequence where the adult Stephanie recreates Britney Spears' '(You Drive Me) Crazy' is tired and typical of a film that thinks it is sufficient to wallow in nostalgia for those in their late thirties and do little else.

Good comedy makes you care about the characters in spite of their flaws.

The characters in 'Senior Year' are so poorly sketched, you really don't care what happens or what they say.

The fact that this is one of those Paramount films that has wound up being released on Netflix probably tells you all you need to know.

'Senior Year' is a digital dumping ground movie and it's as rancid and as spent as you'd expect.

('Senior Year' was released for streaming on Netflix on May 13, 2022)