Review: Senior Year

Image courtesy of Netflix.

The new Rebel Wilson Netflix comedy "Senior Year" takes two well-trodden formulas - the person returning to their high school as an adult and the awaking-from-a-coma scenario - and plastered them together in a film that mostly yields expectable results. It's a perfectly OK high-concept comedy that gets some mileage out of Wilson's style of comedy, which relies on mostly inappropriate behavior.

Stephanie (Angourie Rice as a teenager, Wilson as the adult version) transferred to the United States as a young girl and never quite fit in in middle school. Through much effort, she made herself a popular teenager and captain of the cheerleading squad by the time she was ready to graduate high school in the early 2000s. She'd even snagged the most popular jock, stealing him away from rival cheerleader Tiffany (Zoe Chao plays the adult version).

But a cheerleading routine gone wrong resulted in Stephanie ending up in a coma for 20 years. When she awakens - in 2022 - she is basically still the same 17-year-old girl in a 37-year-old woman's body. She moves home with her agreeable father, and finds out that the two less-popular friends who adored her during high school are now her former school's principal (Mary Holland) and librarian (Sam Richardson). The former - who tells Stephanie that using the words "retard" and "gay" are no longer suitable - is now openly gay, while the latter has long harbored a crush on her.

Rather than try to take up an adult life of some sort, Stephanie decides to finish her senior year of high school and, in the process, again become the captain of the cheerleading squad and the prom queen. I know that in comedies such as these, there's a certain extension of disbelief required, but that Holland's seemingly well-intentioned principal would allow a grown woman to attend a month's-worth of classes and disrupt the other seniors at the high school is a little on the far end of that extension.

There's some humor to be found in the culture clash element of Stephanie's 20-year-old views on popular culture and cultural norms - the cheerleading squad is now mostly comprised of the school's nerds, whose cheers have to do with gun control and saving the environment, rather than the sexed-up routines to which Stephanie was accustomed at the turn of the century. 

The film exists in a fantasyland of how high schools probably exist at this moment - all of the students are socially conscientious pupils who spend their lives on their iPhones (that part is true enough), and this would be nice to believe if we weren't living at a moment when the spawn of less conscientious members of society were shooting up grocery stores in neighborhoods of color or crossing state lines to kill protesters. The student body that Stephanie encounters in 2022 is, perhaps, way too good to be true.

"Senior Year" doesn't go anywhere you don't expect it to - she screws up time and time again, and is again welcomed back by those who actually care for her before having an epiphany - but Wilson's dedication to the slightly cliched material makes it easier to swallow. There's some fun to be had here, even if you see it all coming from a mile away and its depictions of how life on this planet actually operates has nothing to do with what you're experiencing onscreen. In terms of silly Hollywood comedies, you could do far worse than "Senior Year."