Booksmart (15)****
Dir: Olivia Wilde
With: Beanie Feldstein, Kaitlyn Dever, Billie Lourd, Lisa Kudrow, Will Forte, Jason Sudeikis
Runtime: 102 minutes
TWO High School teens determined to have one last hurrah before graduation and going their separate ways in life. How many times have you sat through that movie before?
But don’t be too quick to shelve Olivia Wilde’s Los Angeles- set picture for that reason. The last time a comedy fizzed with this much freshness was the first instalment of The Hangover.
Like The Hangover, featuring buddies on a stag weekend in Vegas, Booksmart is very much a single sex dominated affair. In this case, from directors and writers to stars, it is ladies night.
Best friends Amy and Molly (Kaitlyn Dever and Beanie Feldstein) are a couple of teacher’s pets. They’ve worked hard throughout their High School years, stayed away from the party scene, and are now about to reap the rewards having won places at Yale. Snug in their smugness, what they have failed to realise is there are other ways of succeeding in life. Once this is pointed out, Amy and Molly begin to feel they have missed out big time on a good time. But perhaps it is not too late to do something about it, even if one of Molly’s many firm beliefs is that someone always gets arrested the night before graduation.
Produced by Will Ferrell and Adam McKay (The Other Guys, Anchorman), Booksmart is packed with lots of clever lines and hip coinages. A rich kid in school is nicknamed “the 1%”, asking the ultimate favour, no questions asked, is dubbed “calling a Malala”. These are smart, funny, switched on teens and it is assumed that the audience is right up there with them.
The movie slowly conforms to type as the end draws near, with the usual lessons being learned, hugs dispensed, all the stuff you really have seen so often before. But at its best, Booksmart is a delight, with Dever and Feldstein (so good as as Saoirse Ronan’s best friend in Lady Bird), real finds.
In cinemas from Monday
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