17 AGAIN review by Gary Dean Murray

Making a decent reality-based fantasy film is a uphill task. Making a sword and socery epic is one thing but to place a film in the rhelm of reality, you must get the audience to suspend their disbelief and still keep the flick in a frame of reference. There are basically two choices. Either you must try to explain everything or you must just let the audience go along for the ride and never explain anything. Either way there is a chance you will lose a segment of the viewers. The makers of 17 Again just set up the premise and let it run, never truly trying to explain the how and the why.

The film starts in 1989 and a seventeen year-old Mike O'Donnell (Zac Effron) is getting ready to play the most important basketball game of his life. College scouts will be in attendance and a great showing could land him a full-ride to a major university. Right before the game, his girlfriend Scarlett wants to talk to him but cannot find the words to say what she want to say to Mike. After Mike gets the tip off ball, he glances at his gal and leaves the court. He knows that his love is more important than any other aspect of his young life.

We flash forward sixteen years and Mike is all grown-up and played by Matthew Perry. It seems that his life has not turned out like he has planned. He never got to go to college and works at a job that gets him no respect or satisfaction. Still married to his sweetheart Scarlett (Leslie Mann) but she has filed for divorce. It seems that Mike never finishes anything and is oblivious to everything in his life, including his two teenage kids. Living with Ned (Thomas Lennon) his best bud from high school and now a billionaire uber geek, Mike begins to think that his life was destroyed by not staying and playing that game.

Going back to his high school, he runs into a janitor (Brian Doyle Murray). Later than evening, Mike sees the janitor on a bridge about to jump. Running to help, Mike goes over the bridge and into a swirling void. The next morning he awakes to find him self back in his seventeen year-old body. Both Ned and Mike are convinced that this is some kind of sign and Mike is sure that he is given the chance to go back to school and win that scholarship.

He must now take on the most dreaded of existence known to man, he must go back to high school which has changed much in the twenty years that he was enrolled. 17 Again is about discovering that your children are not who you think they are. It is also about how love is the most important element in life.



A few years ago, I was invited out to LA to interview the cast of High School Musical. Zac was at a career height as the boy Disney star. Now he is trying to break away from that role and this is a nice small step in the right direction. His hard core fans will be pleased to see him play a character not too far removed from his TV persona. He still plays basketball like in HSM but in 17 Again he gets to show some heartfelt emotions. One believes that he is a grown man trapped in the body of a kid, with all its physical joys and emotional disappointments. There are a few moments of actual tears, much like some of the moments from the old Tom Hanks flick Big. I hope that this role leads him down a path of being a leading man and not just a kid actor gone by his late twenties.

Watching Matthew Perry one thinks that the mighty have fallen. This former Friends star was one of the most promising actors a decade ago. Now he is playing a very second fiddle to the next generation of movie stars. This is almost a throw-off role, something for a lesser actor. He does a nice job with the material but there just isn't that much to work with here.

Some major praises have to go to Tom Lennon as the best buddy. He gets a great share of laughs by playing it geeky. The Reno 911 star also shows that he can play it straight. Just about every character he has played have been gay, not that there is anything wrong with that.

Leslie Mann has a charm that just works on the Silver Screen. As Mom, she is tries to be the authority, but you feel that she is incomplete without her Mike. She gives the reading of Scarlett such a wide-eyed enthuism that one never doubts the little fact that she wouldn't recognize her man even after all these years.

One has to hand it to Director Burr Steers for working just about all the angles in. There are all the touching scenes along with the 'fish out of water' moments. He gets some great performances out of his cast especially with the teens who make up most of the work. A bevy of talent is at his fingertips and he uses all of to its comic best.

17 Again works on a surprising amount of levels. It is a solid comedy, with a strong moral center. Yes, there are few new ideas here and this concept has been done to death over the years, but when it works - it works.

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