Senior Year Movie Review: The blasé blast-from-the-past fails to impress

STORY: A high-school ‘cheer captain’ from Harding High has a stunt accident, and slips into a coma before her prom night. She wakes up 20 years later, and goes back to school to reclaim her status as ‘the popular’ and win the prom queen crown.REVIEW: Circa 1999, a 14-year-old Australian dork Stephanie Conway (Rebel Wilson) moves to the US, joins Harding High, and wastes no time in working hard to become one of ‘the populars’. Poring over beauty magazines and doing the ‘it’ girl shebang, she edges out her rival Tiffany in popularity, scores her boyfriend Blaine, and becomes the head cheerleader (sorry, cheer captain!). Steph takes a hard fall (orchestrated by Tiffany) at a prep rally and ends up comatose just before becoming the prom queen, which for her is the gateway to the perfect life.Flash forward to 2022, Stephanie wakes up in a hospital, 37 years old, with the mental age of a 17-y-o. The saga is about her going from “just some average boring invisible girl who had no friends” to an almost-middle-aged determined to reclaim her prom queen crown. Senior Year sets out to be a homage to flicks that would get 80s’ and 90s’ kids nostalgic but falls flat just like Steph in the accident. The film is a blasé blast-from-the-past and painfully overstuffed with tropes. Supportive BFFS who keep showing up even though she takes them for granted, a bunch of ‘misfits’ making way for a salad bowl of inclusion–gay, pudgy, and dark-skinned teenagers, misunderstandings with her besties Martha (now the school principal) and Seth (the librarian who had a crush on her as a teenager), reality check, a heart-wrenching Baz Lurhman’s ‘Wear sunscreen’ kinda speech on social media, et al.The fun part in the flick is that Steph is still sassy, but Martha (Mary Holland) has turned the school into a hotbed of all things appropriate–prom night is gone, cheerleading squad puts up a social awareness ditty, and everyone’s a winner. It’s refreshing to see the tables being turned. An old-timer (relatively speaking) tries to infuse fun into the prudish young gen. Steph’s new nemesis and prospective prom queen is Tiffany’s (Zoe Chao) socially-conscious daughter Brie. While director Alex Hardcastle does a good job of keeping the narrative crisp, the screenplay does no justice to exploring the intricacies of someone dealing with a time-lapse of 20 years. Stephanie just effortlessly glides into her new life and the only thing in name of culture change she deals with is the mobile phone and social media. Albeit a miscast in the role, Rebel Wilson is fun to watch as the teenager in an adult’s body. It’s a fictional comedy, so almost anything goes. One thing that’s a bit off: Stephanie keeps reminding her friends and the audiences that in her head, she is still 17 but doesn’t have an iota of discomfort (in just three months!) hooking up with Seth (Sam Richardson) who’s chronologically the same age as herself or when her ex-boyfriend Blaine (also pushing 40) gets too close for comfort, and objects only because cheating is a no-no. Gen X will find the movie singularly predictable but will relate to and may enjoy the tongue-in-cheek remark on the influencer culture and what it means to be woke these days.