Film Review: ‘Incoming’ fails to deliver on the high school party movie formula

The high school movie is an important genre of film, and one with a multitude of formulas. One of those formulas – and perhaps the one that reigns supreme – is that of the high school party.

“Can’t Hardly Wait.” “Superbad.” “Project X.” “Booksmart.” Plenty of teen movies have tackled the big party, following that tried and true formula all the way to classic, teen movie canonization. In a lot of ways, “Incoming” – a new Netflix film from Dave and John Chernin in their feature length debut – follows that same party movie structure to a T. Four incoming freshmen experience the first part of their high school careers. It has everything you’d expect – romance, drugs, alcohol, and plenty of hijinks. So, why does it fall so frightfully short?

It’s not that “Incoming” lacks originality, necessarily, but rather that it goes through the motions in a fairly lackluster fashion. And those motions are, more often than not, lazy and without even a modicum of the zeal and humor that gives the best of these movies such staying power. There’s a semblance of a spark in the film’s central romance, but that spark fizzles out pretty quickly when it’s propped up by a whole lot of nothing.

“Incoming” starts out by briefly introducing us to each character and what they’re looking for out of their respective high school careers. Benj (Mason Thames) wants to pluck up the courage to tell his sister’s best friend Bailey (Isabella Ferreira) that he has feelings for her. Koosh (Bardia Seiri) wants to hook up with girls and prove he’s just as cool as his older brother. And Eddie (Ramon Reed) and Connor (Raphael Alejandro) are just trying to get by (I’m honestly not sure what their big high school goals are – the movie kind of treats them like an afterthought).

Benj is the character that feels the most like a classic archetype of the high school movie – your typical gawky, but cute kid fumbling his way through his first big crush. Benj’s crush on Bailey fuels most of the film, and Thames and Ferreira are capable enough to imbue most of their scenes together with first love sweetness (with one glaring exception, an early uncomfortable scene that involves accidental flashing on Bailey’s part).

Otherwise, two major questions arise throughout the majority of “Incoming,” and they’re not questions you necessarily want asked of your coming-of-age teen movie: why should I care, and why is this funny? Far be it from anyone to ask for a longer cut of this film, but perhaps we could have used the time. The relationships between the four main boys are so vague and thinly drawn, they might as well not exist at all. You get no real sense of why these four were ever friends. Defining character traits don’t go much further than “rich and misogynistic” or “hates his mom’s boyfriend,” and no one is funny enough to warrant the lack of depth. But what’s more than that is the lack of attention paid to why friendships form in the first place, and the strain that getting older can put on them.

If “Incoming” focused more on the evolution of friendship, or had real, tangible characters to latch onto, you might be able to forgive some of the film’s more juvenile humor – a staple in movies like this, whether it works for you or not. But the big comic set pieces feel out of touch at best, deeply uncomfortable at worst. Of course, teens behaving badly is par for the course in this type of movie, and part of the reason we return to them in the first place – to laugh and cringe at their misguided notions. But here, the jokes never land, and it’s often difficult to discern where the joke even is. In one storyline, Connor and Eddie try to infiltrate the party only to be mistaken as an Uber for the hottest girl in school, Katrina (Loren Gray). Katrina is stupendously drunk, and asks the boys to drive her to a Taco Bell. She downs a bunch of food and then promptly falls asleep and … relieves herself all over the car while passed out.

Again it begs the question, what’s the joke? That it’s gross when a conventionally attractive girl eats a bunch of food? That it’s funny when hot girls do something embarrassing? This does seem to be what “Incoming” is getting at, so maybe it’s not too hard to find the joke after all – just difficult to understand what’s so funny about it in the first place.

The post Film Review: ‘Incoming’ fails to deliver on the high school party movie formula appeared first on Rough Draft Atlanta .