Release Date: April 17, 2009

(out of 4)

My biggest regret about "17 Again" is that I’ve been tapped to think about the movie again after I’ve seen it. I’d rather have never been bothered to think about it again at all. I’d rather be cataloging my music collection right now or organizing my sock drawer. But I’m supposed to review this movie so I better come up with something. (An hour later) I’m back and think I have come up with something to say about this newest out of body comedy.

Hmm, “17 Again.” The movie is condescending and insulting to the intelligence. And yes, I can be swept into the magic of a similarly drawn fairy-tale like “Big” with Tom Hanks or even the girl-tailored “13 Going on 30” with Jennifer Garner. When I say insulting to the intelligence I am talking about the quality of the jokes, the situations, the character development.

The opening scene peeved me where Mike O’Donnell circa 1989 (Zac Efron) walks off the basketball court to embrace the young pregnant Scarlet he loves. Most guys like me would consider ditching an important sports game like that as sacrilegious considering there was a college scout in attendance. But then it occurred to me that young female viewers might consider that very romantic. I’m sure the movie is designed to attract younger impressionable females, so I might have been able to forgive the scene if the rest of the movie hadn’t sent me off my rocker.

We cut to twenty years later with Matthew Perry as the 37-year old Mike O’Donnell. The scenes with the reluctant older O’Donnell having it rough and miserable are scripted with such torpid inaptitude – ex-wife Scarlet in disdain, dissatisfied at work, kids don’t respect him. The movie commiserates with such earnestness that we’re miserable too because we’re starved for some honest insight into O’Donnell’s life situation. But the writing is all done so witlessly, from start to finish, in this uninspired (it’s your turn to fill in the blank).

Substituting for a genie the story consigns a magical janitor who is able to rewind the clock for O’Donnell. O’Donnell reclaims his youth again, via the world’s worst employed special effects, that transforms him back into his 17-year old body. It’s like the moviemakers solicited for a stock image of a whirlpool bath and pasted a floating image of Efron on top of it so Perry can dive in and Presto! Anyway, now that O’Donnell is back in his teen body, nobody from contemporary times is ever going to recognize him. Yeah, right.

O’Donnell wakes up to an immediate hostile situation. Scene with friend Ned (Thomas Lennon) beating up Efron around his own house is noisy, aggravating and pitiful – you mean he doesn’t see the resemblance to the Mike O’Donnell he knew while he was young? Efron hangs around his own son, his own daughter, his own ex-wife. What? Nobody in the family ever saw a picture of the young Mike O’Donnell and recognized that that’s what young Dad looked like? Especially ex-wife Scarlet (Leslie Mann) who must have attention-deficit disorder, early stage dementia or perhaps had a memory transplant in the interim years from high school where she met O’Donnell and her adult years, which would explain why she can’t see that it’s indeed the very same O’Donnell she’s spent half her life with (she needs LOTS and LOTS of evidence before she begins to see the truth). To confuse people, of course, O’Donnell uses the lame excuse that he’s Ned’s kid. This is after, of course, Ned accepts Mike for who he says he is and agrees to become a surrogate guardian.

The plot theoretically exists so (you must have seen this coming) O’Donnell can have that second chance to make everything right again with his ex-wife and distancing kids. Efron, is not such an unappealing actor (though he’s far, far from my favorite and his range is suspect) is like a tanning-bed version of pre-Risky Business Tom Cruise. But Efron is saddled with a substandard sitcom script that requires him to say something out of 17-year old character – oops! – and have to explain why he just said what he said. He keeps forgetting he’s not 37 anymore. I wanted to buy the character a 24-hour thinking cap or perhaps a magic marker so he could write down notes on his arm as reminders.

In the rare scenes of smart humor the movie repeatedly will follow-up by explaining the jokes to you. For example, Ned stands-in as Mike’s father when they go in for high school enrollment. Ned has the hots for the principal (who doesn’t have the hots for Melora Hardin?) Principal Jane Masterson looks on quizzically at Ned’s unctuously leering behavior. Mike explains that his father is not used to meeting school principals who are both smart and attractive. Efron by choosing to play the scene with a sense of maturity and self-aware embarrassment, has good comic delivery when rising to the defense of his would-be father. But the script requires Masterson to say to Mike, “Well that’s flattering but very inappropriate.” It’s as if the script didn’t trust that the audience understood that it was an awkward and inappropriate moment (God forbid the film’s director let actress Hardin underplay the embarrassment). It also squeezes the juice out of the scene when Masterson should be scowling at Ned, not Mike. There are dozens of other examples just like this where an extra snippet of explanatory dialogue treats its audience like boneheads.

If you’ve ever seen a body-swapping or body switcheroo movie than you must have an idea of how this all turns out (Yes, Matthew Perry returns in the third act). Scarlet lets down her defenses. The kids become more self-confident and less prone to making mistakes of their own. And there you have it. Whew, I’m done! I had a Coke and a Snickers bar while I wrote this review (funny how I treat my body like garbage while I think about a garbage movie). I think tonight I will fix myself a gourmet fondue and watch a really cool movie from my video library. Maybe a Tom Hanks movie. Heck, even a bottom drawer Jennifer Garner movie would be a step up. For real, it’s gotta be “Memento.” I’ve always used a cool movie to recover from a bad movie. It’s like head medicine.