Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Senior Year’ on Netflix, a Culture-Shock Comedy in Which Rebel Wilson Flails for Laughs

Rebel Wilson headlines Netflix’s Senior Year, an oh-no-I-woke-up-from-a-20-year-coma-and-need-to-go-back-to-high-school comedy that’ll make you yearn for the days of low-rise jeans and Nelly’s band-aid. The Australian funny lady who broke through by stealing scenes in Bridesmaids plays a dweeb-turned-cheerleader-turned-coma-patient-turned-clueless-maniac who experiences cultural whiplash when she learns that yesterday’s sexualized cheer captains are today’s socially conscious influencers. Sound funny, or just dicey? Let’s find out.

SENIOR YEAR: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Back in 1999, when cell phones had, like, actual antennas on them, Stephanie Conway (Angourie Rice) was the social outcast: Moved to the U.S. from Australia, a little dorky, no discernible personality characteristics, saw the cool kids and wanted to be just like them. By 2002, she set goals and imposed her will on her little world: Lots of makeup, captain of the cheer squad, landed the hot boyfriend, still not much in the way of discernible personality characteristics (don’t blame Steph, blame the screenplay). She treated her true friends, book dweeb Seth (Zaire Adams) and meek Martha (Molly Brown), like crap, so she could make fake friends with the in crowd. She was in a close race for prom queen with her rival Tiffany (Zoe Chao), who fires the following insult at her like one of Legolas’ arrows: “I’m MTV and you’re VH1.” And then there’s a cheerleading accident that puts Steph in a coma for 20 years.

When she comes to in 2022, she’s played by Rebel Wilson, Sam Richardson is Seth, Mary Holland is Martha and Zoe Chao is still Tiffany (how’d that happen?). More importantly, the doctor drops the biggest bomb, that Steph may have a 37-year-old body now, but mentally, she’s still 17, and that’s when we moan that this is another 13 Going on 30 ripoff, but it’s not – it’s just an opportunity to pass off Ally McBeal and Britney Spears references as jokes. Hey, remember TRL? The Real World: New Orleans? How people used to use “gay” as an insult? Well, this movie will remind you!

Adult-body/teenage-mind Steph could get her GED and go to counseling, but that’s not wacky enough for this movie. No, she wants to pick up right where she left off and complete her senior year in the same high school, because someone thought it’d be funny if Rebel Wilson played a walking time capsule who calls a thumb drive a “computer tampon” and pretends to use a graphing calculator as a smartphone. Reintegration into school life is a complicated endeavor, considering Martha is the principal now, Seth is the school librarian and Tiffany’s daughter is now the most popular kid in school. But golly, have things changed – the cheerleaders are dweebs in baggy pants cheering about sexual consent and the environmental impact of plastic straws, the popular kid has a zillion Instagram followers, and there’s no competition for prom queen so everyone’s a winner and nobody’s a loser. Steph’s gonna do something about all of this, while also catching up on the important stuff: “I just found out there were eight more Fast and Furious movies!” Talk about culture shock.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Senior Year takes bits of Mean Girls, Billy Madison, Back to School, Clueless, 21 Jump Street (the movie) and about a half-dozen other conceptually similar films and/or turn-of-the-millennium-era high school comedies, and turns it into bland mush.

Performance Worth Watching: The material fails pretty much everyone here, but if I’m forced to choose, I’ll go with Justin Hartley as the adult version of Steph’s former boyfriend, now married to Tiffany. The character’s a Hummer salesman (gosh, the jokes just write themselves, don’t they) stuck in what appears to be a miserable marriage, and Hartley, despite limited screen time, ekes out a laugh or two by playing the former hunky bro who’s trying to maintain that status while he’s surely secretly under Tiffany’s boot.

Memorable Dialogue: I’ll spoil the one halfway-decent one-liner here: “Even though I was brain dead, you were the one that kept my heart beating.”

Sex and Skin: Nothing beyond crude talk and lascivious cheerleader dance routines.

Our Take: Senior Year wants us to remember all the teen movies we enjoyed 20 years ago, which frankly isn’t a sound strategy, especially when you failed to write any decent jokes. There are precisely zero reasons to watch this instead of any of the films it pays homage to: Wilson flails and mugs in an attempt to sell this rickety, laughless premise, and never emotionally grounds the character (she’s way funnier as a character actress in stuff like Pitch Perfect and JoJo Rabbit). The situations and supporting characters are thrice-microwaved rehash. At nearly two hours, it’s overlong, padded with a surplus of “funny” musical-dance sequences, including a limp homage to Britney Spears’ “Crazy.” It’s a real watch-looker-atter of a movie: Is it over yet?

And yet, its most egregious misstep is its failure to be more than just a stream of references. Setting aside any questions of the scenario’s scientific accuracy, what’s it like to have a near-middle-aged body but a teenage brain? The film also likes to play the That Was Then, This Is Now game, but renders limp any satire of the relatively less-P.C. early ’00s in comparison to the current social media age. There is no keen observation or humorous critical commentary here, just the dumbest, easiest, most obvious jokes. Remember, you could be watching Easy A instead of this, which is more like Easy D-.

Our Call: Senior Year wants to be MTV in 2002, but it’s MTV in 2022. SKIP IT, and skip it hard.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.