Mark Reviews Movies: SENIOR YEAR

Senior Year, Netflix

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 13, 2022

The concept of Senior Year is simple and strange enough for there to be at least some potential within it. Here, a woman awakens from a coma after about 20 years, and instead of having a month or so left of high school, she finds herself suddenly in her late 30s.

Basically, there are two obvious options here. This turn of events is either depressing and tragic or absurd and amusing. The screenplay by Brandon Scott Jones, Andrew Knauer, and Arthur Peilli initially and decidedly decides upon the second choice, and Stephanie Conway (Rebel Wilson), our adult protagonist whose mind remains trapped within the thinking of a teenager, is in a massive culture shock.

When a severe head injury put her into that coma, cellphones were still relatively rare and had little screens, and the idea of social media was in its infancy. Popularity was a local concept, not a global one, and a generally nice, if somewhat socially unaware, girl like Stephanie's younger self (played by Angourie Rice) could be the most popular kid in high school. In addition to the coma, the brain trauma must have resulted in some kind of personality change for Stephanie, by the way, because Wilson's Stephanie comes out of the gate with a frantic, desperate, bad-tempered, and unnecessarily rude attitude that probably would shock her 17-year-old self.

That's just one of several inconsistencies within this material that makes its characters, plot, and humor seem pieced together from disparate sources and/or ideas, whether they make sense as a whole or not. Wilson's loud and over-the-top Stephanie, obviously, comes from the comic actor's fame and propensity for playing such characters.

To this movie, it doesn't matter if Rice plays the younger version of the character, a cheerleader with a popular boyfriend, as sweet, if a bit aloof, as long as Wilson gets to do whatever she wants with this material. Since the movie begins (after a brief introduction with the older character setting up the story's big emotional catharsis well before it matters) with the younger Stephanie in an extended prologue, the change is particularly jarring.

The plot has the awakened Stephanie convincing Martha (Mary Holland), one of her best friends from high school who is now the school's principal, to let her return to secondary education, become popular again, and graduate. The cultural and technical landscapes have changed since her teenage years in the early 2000s—not to mention her personal connections, with high school boyfriend Blaine (Justin Hartley) now married to school rival Tiffany (Zoë Chao). With some help from students and other best friend Seth (Sam Richardson), Stephanie starts to figure out making friends and becoming popular in the current age of social media.

From there, there's a lot more inconsistency—from some occasional jabs at modern politics (Stephanie says a couple of offensive things on the way home from the hospital, only to be corrected by a friend, and the school has a winner-less, so as not have any losers, philosophy) that already feel dated and shallow, to a bunch of characters and subplots that disappear as soon as others take over, and to some more important things. Stephanie's mother, for example, dies between the girl's awkward and unpopular freshman year and her rise to the top of social food chain in her senior year (Her father is played by Chris Parnell).

The prologue ignores that fact, while the present-day story only occasionally references it until it becomes the foundation for Stephanie to get her life in order and, generally, become a more sympathetic figure. Obviously, the movie begins trying to find its comedic bearings, bringing out Stephanie's exaggerated personality and a bunch of eccentric side players and various story threads involving the protagonist's attempts to become the most popular person in school again. Since a dead mother isn't exactly the stuff of laughs—especially this movie's brand of cheap and easy ones—or comic potential, the whole detail is shoved into the backdrop. Since Stephanie eventually has to grow up and learn a lesson and become a sympathetic figure, that detail is later crammed back into the story with a transparent level of emotional manipulation.

Comedy does require a certain amount of logic. That's not to be found in Senior Year, which sacrifices the majority of its potential for a string of obvious and lazy jokes.

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