Well after a month or so, maybe 2 months i think, i'm back with a new review, i've been working on something else so i've not had time to review stuff but felt like i needed to add atleast 1 post for the month so here's my review for Teen spy comedy BARELY LETHAL. Check out my words after the jump....
Teen comedies, a
staple of growing up, for me it was stuff like American Pie,
Eurotrip, Empire Records and She's All That, nowadays, most Teen
comedies are films which seem to be mixing genres. There's nothing
entirely wrong with that but a lot of these films don't seem to work,
take for instance last years Vampire Academy, a mix of horror, teens
and comedy which in all honesty was a complete fuck up, but sometimes
crossing genre's does work, well, as good as it can. The best example
of a cross genre teen comedy is Kick-Ass, ok ok, I know Kick-Ass is
R-rated and all but when you think about it, it's really just another
teen comedy, all beit one with intense scenes of violence and a 10
year old female assassin, what i'm getting at is that unless it's
done well and the comedy is balanced with the
action/horror/sci-fi...etc, it can totally work.
This years latest
addition to the cross genre teen comedy is BARELY LETHAL, a cross
between Mean Girls and Teen Agent (or if you're American If Looks
Could Kill) or a younger version of 22 Jump Street. Basically, if you
took the whole segment of Mindy going to high school from Kick-Ass 2
and stretched it to 105 minutes, that's basically what Barely Lethal
is. To be honest I always thought that part of Kick-Ass 2 was the
weakest of the film but here, the premise actually works to the
film's advantage. The plot follows, 16 year old Teen spy, Megan,
taken as child and trained by Sam L.Jackson (the hardest working man
in movies) in a secret government black ops facility, think Kurt
Russell's Soldier. After a mission to capture arms dealer Jessica
Alba (ha!) ends with Megan accidentally falling from a helicopter
extraction, she decides to teen it up and find out what a childhood
should actually be like minus the guns and explosions. She signs up
as a foreign exchange student and ends up living with a family and
attending the local high-school. The usual shit happens, she
befriends the AV geek, falls for the guy in the band, goes “viral”
on youtube, etc.... until she attends a party where her nemesis shows
up, played well by Game Of Thrones' Sophie Turner (Sansa Stark) and a
battle ensues. The you get the inevitable teen comedy ending with
Homecoming and a kitchen fight...
It's all very very
very familiar, but you know what, it kinda works, sure it's never
going to win any awards, and I swear the car chase was recycled from
another movie, it looked very familiar, but it was actually a lot
fun. I put this down to Sam Jackson's almost Jules' like performance
and the brilliance of Hailee Steinfeld's on point performance as
Megan. Her performance as the fish out of water teen really lifts the
film out of a slump of familiarity. Jessica Alba is hot, this is a
fact, everyone knows this but she was horribly miscast as the
“villain” she didn't really sell me on the idea that she was the
extremely dangerous global arms dealer, I know it's clichéd but I
really wanted Peter Stormare to show up as some creepy German arms
dealer but alas he didn't.
The action sequences
are a bit poor, they could have pushed the potential for action but
sadly they relied to heavily on the comedy side than the action side.
I mean they can't blame the budget, Which I can't imagine was much
because if Gareth Evans can make The Raid on less than 5 million,
some awesome fight scenes could have been achieved but for a “chick
flick” ( I fucking hate that term) and a film aimed at teenagers,
the fights do what they can to push along the plot.
The film was
directed Kyle Newman, his first feature since the wonderful Star Wars
love letter, Fan Boys in 2009. He really really struggles. The high
school stuff and teen stuff he can handle, but the action and the
really really shitty CGI (even worse than Olympus Has Fallen) really
show a director who needs to up his game in future. Fan Boys was a
great little film, that's a given but he doesn't seem to know how to
handle a film on a higher budget and keeps nicking stuff from other
movies.
The screenplay was
written by first time writer, John D'Arco, and while the script is
coherent and moves at a good pace, he seems to have literally just
watched a bunch of teen films and the TV show Alias and decided to
write a movie that combines the two, and in some respects he does
succeed, but only slightly, it's over familiarity and cliched look at
high school life is it's biggets downfall. But despite the amateur
talent working behind the camera, and I only mean amateur in the fact
the director has only directed 1 other feature and this is the
writer's first screenplay, This film still manages to have some fun.
I laughed at some scenes and cringed at others, but I'm not a film
maker, i'm a dude sat at his computer telling you what he thought, I
don't know how hard it is to find a script and realize it on screen
so I have to give Kudos to Kyle Newman for doing what he could with a
script that borrows so heavily from other, superior films but still
managed to entertain me.
Like I said, Barely
Lethal isn't going to win awards, well it might win a kids choice
award or an MTV movie award but they don't really count, but i'd
definitely give it a re-watch, it's not a complete washout. Hailee
Steinfeld is a joy to watch and has some great comic timing, she
reminded me of Emma Stone in Easy A a little. Sophie Turner is icey
cool as her nemesis Heather, a roll completely removed from her GoT
role and Sam Jackson's just paying the bills.
I enjoyed it, I
laughed, I cringed but I stayed with it and it entertained me so it
gets a decent 3/5 from me...
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