Blockers review: a dream cast turns every parent's worst nightmare into comedy gold
Dir: Kay Cannon. Cast: Leslie Mann, John Cena, Ike Barinholtz, Kathryn Newton, Gideon Adlon, Geraldine Viswanathan, Graham Phillips, Miles Robbins, Jimmy Bellinger, Ramona Young. 15 cert, 102 mins
There are 19-year-olds, walking among us, who were not born when American Pie (1999) came out. This bombshell might take some processing, as does the fact that the stars of that gross-out phenomenon are now roughly the age of the parents in Blockers – a trio of controlling worrywarts who can’t help meddling in their children’s sex lives.
In updating the teen raunch-comedy formula with the added twist of parental intervention, the pact in Pie for all those boys to lose their virginity has undergone surgery. It’s now a secret arrangement between three girls, who have chosen the very evening of prom night to pop their cherries.
Two (Kathryn Newton, Geraldine Viswanathan) are straight, and one (Gideon Adlon) is a lesbian, though she hasn’t told anyone yet: like the other two, she has a male date to the prom, and tries to talk herself into hooking up without the slightest trace of conviction or relish.
Blending coarse belly laughs with surprisingly tender acting and writing, Blockers qualifies as a way-above-average studio comedy, in a year that has already brought us the deft, ingratiating Game Night. Kay Cannon makes her debut as a director, after proving her savviness and wit on the subject of youth culture as the screenwriter of the Pitch Perfect series.
Even the plot manouevres are pulled off with multitasking entertainment value. The way the three parents – Leslie Mann, John Cena, Ike Barinholtz – find out about their daughters’ sex pact is via a group chat pinging up on the laptop one of them left open. While barely needing to show any, this scene really goes to town on the emoji combinations teens use, a morass of daunting hieroglyphics to the previous generation. If you didn’t know that aubergines were standard emoji-euphemism for penises, or which hand gesture signifies “yaaass queen!”, you will now.
Because any such movie needs its Jason Biggs-boffing-a-pie moment, there’s a virtually indescribable set piece involving a beer bong and part of Cena’s anatomy, crowbarred in when these frantic moral guardians track down their princesses at the prom afterparty. The wrestler-turned-star, a comedy staple now after Trainwreck, Sisters and the Daddy’s Home films, perhaps remains more a human special effect than he is a legitimate actor, but like Arnie in his Kindergarten Cop days, he’s the kind of walking punchline that knows its value.
Leslie Mann’s warmth and air of charming confusion have helped many a film before. But she gets some definitive moments for the clipreel here, especially a stricken escape scene in a bridal suite, which – something of a Cannon forte, this – is touching and funny at the same time.
As a single mom who hadn’t considered how sweetly her daughter’s loved-up boyfriend might go about things, she has a beautifully forlorn epiphany once she’s snuck in for recon, but then finds herself living every mother's worst nightmare, trapped under the bed during heavy petting.
The girls – especially Viswanathan, a whiz at eye-rolling sass – are wonderful. But the film’s secret weapon is Barinholtz, whose hilarious timing – just wait for him repeatedly trying to make a redundant point about Dan Brown’s Inferno – elevates every bit of material he gets.
His quip about a merkin is one for the ages, and while Blockers may not launch quite as many fledgling careers as American Pie did, this guy, at least, ought to get some serious mileage out of it. Not bad, all round, for a multiplex-filler that could have been half as good and still passed the time.
