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SUPERCOOL
Director: Teppo Airaksinen Cast: Jake Short, Miles J. Harvey, Damon Wayans Jr., Madison Davenport, Odessa A'zion, Iliza Shlesinger, Peter Moses, Jonathan Kite, Kira Kosarin, Will Meyers, Greg Cromer, Luis Fernandez-Gil MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 1:32 Release Date: 2/11/22 (limited; digital & on-demand) |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 10, 2022 Supercool is a weird comedy—not in what it's about, but in how every element feels either like repetition of what it has done or a distraction from whatever it's trying to do. On the surface, it's pretty simple: a teenage guy has a crush on a girl and goes through a lot of trouble to try to gain her attention/affection. The gimmick involves a wish that turns him into a male model, while the trouble includes an adult man who wants a teenage boy—or a pair of them—to participate in sex with his girlfriend. The joke itself is strange and uncomfortable enough, but somehow, the fact that Olli Haikka and Ali Moussavi's screenplay uses the same gag on two separate occasions might be even stranger. That's the way of director Teppo Airaksinen's movie, though. It may not possess a single successful joke, but it'll sure use that joke as many times as possible. Our guy-with-the-crush is Neil (Jake Short), a nerdy outsider who pines from afar for Summer (Madison Davenport). He draws comics about an idealized form of himself, rescuing her from a kidnapping attempt, and she offers a kiss—plus a lot more—as a reward. In real life, though, when his sister Jaclyn (Odessa A'zion) and best friend Gilbert (Miles J. Harvey) convince him to ask for an invitation to Summer's birthday party, Neil vomits on her. Mortified, he makes a late-night wish to have a second chance with Summer. The whole premise, by the way, is established as a throwaway line, which is so inconsequential that it's a surprise when the gimmick turns out to be the key of the plot—while really not amounting to much within the actual story. In the morning, everyone sees him as that idealized comic book hero brought to life. Neil has until that night to woo Summer before the wish expires. All of this is pretty juvenile, from the vomiting to the sex-heavy dialogue, which could be fine—if the movie had some intelligence and/or humor to go along with that characteristic. Instead, we get that unconnected pair of perverts (at least one of them only suggests the sex, which means, yes, there's a really discomforting scene at some point), a neighbor (played by Damon Wayans Jr.) who gets his kicks robbing gas stations at gunpoint (This separates the two friends for a long stretch, eliminating the only element that's broadly endearing), and an exclusive sex party that results in two characters crawling through sewage. These concepts and misadventures are so random and strained that the whole of Supercool feels disconnected from itself. That the movie isn't funny is secondary—and basically a given. Copyright © 2022 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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