2223. Blockers (2018)

Starring: Leslie Mann, John Cena, Ike Barinholtz

Director: Kay Cannon

Running Time: 102 mins

Blockers is an American film about a trio of parents who go to extreme lengths to stop their teenage daughters from losing their virginity on their prom night.

This film just wasn’t funny. It’s a premise we’ve seen countless times before, normal parents/middle-aged men and women getting sucked back into the world of the youth, and consequently getting into all sorts of mishaps and dire situations. The problem with Blockers, however, is that it uses that premise in such a painfully basic manner, allowing only for shrill and extremely predictable comedy that never once made me laugh.

In effect, the comedy here is pretty much identical to the sort you’d get in American Pie. The story surrounding the teenage daughters is exactly the same as American Pie, but given that the story’s focus is on the parents, it’s fortunately not quite identical.

Throughout, the lead trio of Leslie Mann, John Cena and Ike Barinholtz find themselves in a range of very lively locations populated by loud young people, inevitably being drawn in by the party lifestyle while trying to find their daughters among the crowd. Then, the comedy does go all American Pie, the only difference being that it’s adults getting involved in all of the chaos, rather than teenagers, a running joke that the film thinks is enough to support it for an entire 102 minutes of screentime.

That’s obviously not the case, and seeing the adults turn into mindless lunatics as they are thrown miles off course from their objectives inevitably tires very quickly, with the film offering nothing else to keep you entertained for the remainder of the movie.

The fact is that Blockers’ shrill and predictable humour isn’t funny at the outset, it’s a brand of comedy that tires within minutes, and then its attempt to keep it up for the remainder is just painful to watch, ultimately summing up the very important point that this movie just isn’t funny, and you simply shouldn’t watch it because it won’t make you laugh.

Strangely, the only saving grace of the entire movie comes in the form of one exceptional scene in which the mad comedy stops for a second, and the parents briefly examine their relationship with both their daughters and one another. It’s a moment of drama that immediately caught my attention, and the emotional depth that the script manages to build in a short space of just a few minutes is really striking, proving that there is some good talent behind this film, but it’s only showcased in intelligent fashion for just a couple of minutes.

Overall, I hated Blockers. Unfunny and irritating from the start, it’s a film that gets worse and worse as it goes on pushing a comedic premise that’s just not working, and with the exception of a randomly brilliant moment of emotional drama about two-thirds of the way through, there’s nothing interesting nor noteworthy about it, and that’s why I’m giving it a 4.8.