17 Again

17 Again is the most recent film in the body/age swapping genre, joining such classics as Freaky Friday and 18 Again.  Mike O'Donnell's (Matthew Perry) life sucks.  He hates his job, his wife (Leslie Mann) is leaving him, and his children  (Michelle Trachtenberg and Sterling Knight) want nothing to do with him.  From where he stands at nearly 40 years old, everything bad in his life could have been different were it not for one moment.  It was that moment that he gave up a championship game and the chance at a full scholarship to be a basketball star in order to be with his newly discovered to be pregnant girlfriend (Allison Miller).

Bing bang boom (no pun intended), and Matthew Perry turns into Zac Efron as he transforms back into 17 year old Mike.  Determined to course correct his life by starting over from where he left off, Mike enrolls in high school with his uber geeky, uber rich buddy Ned (Thomas Lennon) posing as his father.  For the first time, he is able to start to connect with his two kids, being let into their world like only a peer would and he tries to become sort of an undercover father, doing the things he couldn't or didn't do when he was an adult.  The formula is pretty simple - hilarity ensues, lessons are learned, people are changed and there's a happy ending.

Just because the ingredients are standard, however, doesn't mean the recipe is bland.  There are some truly awkward/disturbing scenes that give this movie a slightly more adult feel, and there is genuine humour to be found.  Ned and the school principal (Melora Hardin) are charming as two geeks who are thrilled to find someone of their own breed, and are usually convincing in the role.  I am not sure, though, that geeks of their magnitude would refer to the language as simply "Elvish," but would have specified Quenya or Sindarin.  Granted, the target audience would probably have no Middle Earthly clue as to what they were talking about then.

The many geeky pop culture references really helped this movie to be entertaining for me.  The acting was surprisingly solid and Zac Efron does a shockingly good Matthew Perry.  I was amused/not irritated for the whole movie, which was something I was not expecting.  Yes it is 95% predictable, but sometimes it's nice to watch something that is not Inception or The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus.  I probably enjoyed this movie more than I should have and that's probably due to things like random light-saber battles, but you could really do a lot worse.  Especially in the genre of teen comedy.

**** (4/5 stars)