Senior Year – Film Review

A high-school cheerleader falls into a coma before her prom. Twenty years later, she awakens and wants to return to high school to reclaim her status and become prom queen.

It’s summer, and you know what that means! Oh… right. The inevitable time when Netflix dumps a whole bucket load of content in our faces and we have to scrounge around and find what’s actually good. But obviously, it’s frustrating to have to sort through the bad to find gold. Sadly, Alex Hardcastle‘s Senior Year falls into the former category. The film definitely has its moments but the vast majority of the time is spent with wildly annoying characters who populate this terribly predictable, corny, and bland script that honestly offers nothing new to the coming-of-age scene.

First thing’s first – the humor in this movie sucks. It’s seriously awful. Rebel Wilson‘s character Stephanie Conway is fun and likeable at times, but there are some sequences where we can’t help but hate her, which wasn’t the intention. In one scene early on, she drops the “r” word like it’s nothing and uses the word “gay” as a way to insult something. Luckily, two characters in the film immediately correct her and straighten her out, but it’s still frustrating to imagine a screenwriter legitimately writing this scene down on paper.

Wilson is extremely charismatic in the role and she definitely brings her A-game here. You can tell while watching the film that she has a lot of passion for this story and she wanted to do her best, and she is quite charming in the role. However, I will say that I found myself being compelled by her younger self in the film, portrayed by Angourie Rice.

Surprisingly, there are quite a lot of cameos in here that took me off-guard. Seriously, some actors’ appearances in this movie took me by more of a surprise than the cameos in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. For example, what the heck is Jeremy Ray Taylor doing here? And Michael Cimino? Steve Aoki?

There are some scenes where Senior Year actually has a big, beating heart and you’ll find yourself getting invested in what’s going on, but then, next thing you know, the screenwriters come along and make everything cringe-inducing again. A lot of this movie is exactly that – heartwarming scene, funny scene, then… ugh. Terrible dialogue, and a story that feels totally directionless. At one point in the movie, I checked to see how much longer I had in the film to go and saw that there were forty remaining minutes and yet, even still, the film didn’t have a clear story direction.

To be fair, there are way worse ways to spend your time, but that doesn’t make Senior Year any less terrible. The film is a sloppily written mess of a comedy complete with unlikeable characters, a directionless story, and painfully cringe-worthy dialogue.