Blockers

Blockers is a pretty funny movie. It takes the premise of a coming of age story and gives it a twist by focusing more on the parents coming to grips with their newly grown kids than on the kids themselves. In this way, it provides an interesting alternative perspective on the genre tropes of over-the-top prom parties, teenage sex, and conflicts over redefining boundaries between parent and child as the end of high school, and the start of college, loom large.

One of the film’s great strengths is in its ability to take the familiar aspects of the “end of high school” movie and turn them on their head. In particular, Blockers takes adult characters that are frequently stock cliches and turns them into fully formed, multidimensional people. The overprotective mom isn’t a one note gimmick but someone who is projecting based on their own negative experiences as a teen. The absent father isn’t a deadbeat but an emotionally damaged and isolated man who never recovered from a contentious divorce.

Best of all, this added dimensionality is not accomplished by merely swapping poor characterization for the adults with poor characterization for the kids. All three daughters, while not the film’s primary focus, have well defined individual identities and function as effective supporting characters. Each one is totally believable as a member of their long standing friendship group, with different but complementary personalities. Each parent/daughter pair also makes sense, both in the nuanced way each daughter approaches their interest in sex and how each parent reacts to them potentially becoming sexually active.

Importantly, none of this character development, even the aspects that touch on dower topics, detracts from the ability of the film to find a joke. The movie is funny. I wasn’t clutching my sides from laughing so hard it hurts, but I also wasn’t just sitting there merely bemused. Mark Kermode, a film critic for BBC radio, has a rule that a comedy has to make him laugh (out loud) at least six times to be considered a success. I have always liked this as a baseline metric for evaluating comedies and this film passes that test easily.

That said, not every joke landed for me. In particular, there are a few moments that lean heavily on gross out style humor that I didn’t find particularly funny. I’ve never been a fan of gross out humor in general, although when it is done exceptionally well it can make me laugh a la There’s Something About Mary. Here, however, it is not exceptionally well done. To give an example, at one point in the movie the parents find themselves in a situation where they feel they must butt chug beer to get something they need. This isn’t used as a premise for a joke, this is the punchline. Spit on the end of a tube, up the bum, that’s the whole joke. Childish, inelegant, lazy writing; I cringed more than I laughed. However, in fairness to the film, these moments are few and far between.

Blockers has a clever way of both recognizing and subverting the tropes of teenage coming of age movies without feeling like a postmodern critique of the genre. Teen comedies are often about parents, or at least parental figures, trying to stop teens from doing what they want, but Blockers positions those parents as the protagonists rather than the antagonists. It then turns the parents’ wild night of trying to stop their kids into one that rivals the antics of teens in a typical coming of age movie. They wreck a car like in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. They crash a party like in 10 Things I Hate About You. In the end, they all learn something from the experience about themselves, and their bonds are strengthened, like in The Breakfast Club. Through this device, Blockers is able to deliver plenty of laughs, and tender moments, as all good coming of age movies do. It just occasionally leans on gross moments in lieu of genuine punchlines.

Would Recommend: If you are looking for an uncomplicated comedy with a fresh twist on an established subgenre.

Would Not Recommend: If teenage antics and touches of gross out humor are too childish for your tastes.