Review: Blockers

Blockers
Cert: 15 / 102 mins / Dir. Kay Cannon / Trailer

EXT. NIGHT.
On an otherwise deserted country-road, three concerned parents stand 15-20 feet away from their upturned car.
Mid conversation, the car explodes unexpectedly.

THE LESLIE MANN CHARACTER (screaming):
The car just exploded!

Yes, welcome to Blockers, the new R-rated comedy from Universal in which three slightly-fusty parents go out of their way to stop their teenage girls having 'fun' on their prom-night - an act which inadvertently expands to include the audience, as well. Hoping that those watching are fans of movies like Hall Pass and This is 40, but without remembering enough of those to make any direct comparison, Kay Cannon's film pitches Leslie Mann, Ike Barinholtz and John Cena as the blinkered over-protectors, against Kathryn Newton, Gideon Adlon and Geraldine Viswanathan, trying desperately to lose their respective virginities.

Whether it's because a) I'm not a parent to a teenage girl, b) I've never been a teenage girl, or c) I've seen almost every gag here done elsewhere and far better, I'm clearly not the target audience for this. Is "adults comedically decoding emoji" where we are in 2018? Who is Blockers for, demographically? Is it teenagers who want to see him from off of Midnight Caller padding naked around the house in some excruciating sex-game? Or adults who want to go and watch a comedy about three teenage girls trying to get laid? Neither seems convincing, while each explains the relative silence in screen 4 this evening - until a slightly portly chauffeur goes to do an action-roll over the bonnet of his car and ends up falling on the ground. Fat Man Falling Over™. That made them laugh.

Mann and Barinholtz act like two people at the Team Apatow reunion party who haven't moved on to bigger projects, while John Cena effortlessly demonstrates why he's the guy the studios phone when the budget won't stretch to Dwayne Johnson. Their teenage charges fare a little better in their own awkwardly charming way, albeit one which signposts that the roles have been written by two middle-aged men. As a gender-flipped Superbad, the film might have been worth making if the parents were strictly minor-characters. But without those same adults to telegraph and explain every joke in the script, the film wouldn't serve Universal's purpose.

Credit where it's due: I smiled three or four times in the last hour. But I don't know if that's because the script had started to pick up, or some kind of cinematic Stockholm Syndrome was kicking in…

There's a bit in Blockers where six teenagers in the back of a prom-limo are screaming and projectile-vomiting in time to The Marriage of Figaro. This is a crystallisation of the whole film.

This is like someone's taken Superbad*¹ and put it in a blender with Sex Tape and Bad Moms, then boiled it for long enough to remove all the jokes.



It's not.



Stream it, tops.



It's not.



That depends on how wrong you are.



There isn't.



Level 2: Leslie Mann's in this, and she was in that Knocked Up, alongside Alan 'K-2SO' Tudyk and Bill 'BB-8' Hader.





*¹ Which, when you consider that the writers of Superbad, Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen, are producers on Blockers, is not so much a compliment as a staggering lack of self-awareness. ^{[ BACK ]}

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• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
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