Blockers

photo courtesy of comingsoon.net

LIGHT SPOILERS

     Writer and producer Kay Cannon (30 Rock) makes her directorial debut with Blockers, a movie that puts a gender-swapped spin on the teen sex comedy. The movie stars John Cena, Leslie Mann, and Ike Barinholtz as parents of three senior girls (Geraldine Viswanathan, Kathryn Newton, Gideon Adlon) who team up to thwart their daughters’ plans to lose their virginity on prom night. As they soon discover, outsmarting teenagers is more difficult than they think.

     If there’s something to be said for Blockers, it’s that it dives in headfirst and never looks back. It knows what it wants to be. If there’s another thing that’s to be said about Blockers, it’s that its confidence is misplaced. Blockers tries to be both hilariously irreverent and heartwarming—a sort of socially progressive Deadpool meets Full House—but it can’t quite manage to be either.  

photo courtesy of variety.com

     Let’s start by tackling the humor. Blockers belongs to that category of comedy which relies on shock and awe to get laughs; instead of smartly written jokes, you’ve got gross-outs, dick jokes, and schadenfreude. (And yes, Blockers is very much rated R, thanks to language and graphic nudity.) Anyone who’s seen the movie’s marketing should know what to expect in that regard—especially considering that its posters stylize the title as “Cock Blockers”—so you probably have an idea of whether or not you’ll enjoy Blockers’ specific brand of humor before you get into the theater.

     But Blockers’ humor is rough even given its intentions. There are some solid jokes, to be sure, but most of them come from the teenage actresses rather than their A-list actor parents. Viswanathan, who plays Cena’s daughter, is easily the bright spot of the entire film; she commands several scenes with natural comedic instincts at her disposal. Meanwhile, John Cena and company receive the primary focus of the movie, but their material is only hit-or-miss funny. By the time the credits rolled, I found myself wishing the movie had just dispensed with the parents altogether and spent more time interacting with the teenage characters.

photo courtesy of vox.com

     At certain points throughout the action, Blockers hits the brake pedal and takes a moment to reflect on the relationships between its characters. I suppose it’s admirable for a movie billed as a “sex comedy” to put this much thought into things, but every time Blockers tries to make this switch, it comes off as a wild, unearned tonal leap. One moment John Cena is butt-chugging with frat guys, the next he’s having a heart-to-heart with his friends about the ways they’ve grown apart through the years. It’s possible to imagine a movie that balances those elements well, but Blockers doesn’t manage the tonal shifts competently, undermining its efforts at character development and emotional payoff. Even where it tries to introduce socially progressive ideas into the narrative, its execution is so clumsy that its intentions are only partially realized.

     FINAL VERDICT: Blockers is a mismatched mix of low-brow comedy and cheesy life lessons.

Watch the (NSFW) trailer here.

photo courtesy of vanityfair.com