17 Again

Review

Let me say right out that I’m prepared to suspend my disbelief and go with the idea that a man who made a fateful decision at the age of 17 and spent the next twenty years regretting it and being an ineffectual, sad-sack husband and father could meet an angel in the person of an old janitor and magically become his teenage self again and have the chance to take the road not taken. Fineďż˝it’s a movie. What I can’t accept is that the stringy, insipidly earnest teen idol Zac Efron would grow up to be the defensively ironic, twisty-faced Matthew Perry. Actually, even with actors who echoed each other’s mannerisms, 17 Again would still be lame. Efron labors hard to get laughs, but after years of working for the Disney Channel, all he knows how to do is mug and lip-synch, and this movie doesn’t even have singing. As the wife, Leslie Mann has a cute drunk scene where she closely peers into his face and slurs that he looks like her husband when he was 17, but then the character sobers up and goes back to being oblivious. Trust me, the best dialogue is in Elvish. The movie was directed by Burr Steers, whose résumé includes the bracing Igby Goes Down and episodes of Big Love. The only explanation is that 17 Again is autobiographical: A janitor made him a teenager, he took the road more traveled by, and he’s now a studio hack. — David Edelstein