Here’s the formula for a successful studio comedy in 2018: A diverse group of people and personalities making fools of themselves, getting real about stuff, and telling a lot of dick jokes.
Here’s a great one from Blockers: “I’d rather eat 10 dicks than one Mounds.” This is an accurate statement, and it would’ve still been funny if Paul Rudd told it. But instead it’s more appropriately told by a teenage girl excited to learn that the condom her boyfriend will be using will taste like an Almond Joy.
Kay Cannon, who wrote all three Pitch Perfect films but is directing for the first time, gives Blockers the familiar Apatow-sheen (it’s produced by Seth Rogen), but she jumbles the cast enough that it feels fresh and doesn’t fall into the same tropes. It flips the script on the male teen sex romp and makes the parents an integral part of this ensemble comedy. It doesn’t short change any member of its talented cast, and it even finds time for some heart-tugging moments about parenting and adulthood.
Three girls, Julie, Sam and Kayla, have been inseparable since preschool, which has in turn pushed their parents, Lisa, Mitchell and Hunter, together as quasi-friends. Now days before graduating high school, Julie (Kathryn Newton) decides she’s ready to sleep with her sweetheart on prom night. Not to be left out, Sam and Kayla (Gideon Adlon and Geraldine Viswanathan) vow to lose their virginity along with her. When their parents catch wind of this, spied via a hilariously inscrutable series of emojis on Julie’s laptop, they’re none too pleased and set out to “cock block these motherfuckers.”
It’s a fun, combative dynamic between parents and daughters, despite the care and love that Cannon makes implicit between them. Blockers opens with a series of home movies and flashback footage, as well as taking pains to establish the relationships between parents and daughters before even getting into the contours of the sex pact. It’s a little slow going at first, with the raunchier humor not quite landing with the bite it needs. But that development proves necessary during the film’s wackier set pieces.
Lisa (Leslie Mann), a single mom, is tied at the hip with Julie and is only opposed to Julie sleeping with her boyfriend in fears that she’ll follow him to college in Los Angeles and leave her mom behind all alone. Hunter (Ike Barinholtz) is divorced and estranged from his daughter Sam, but puts on a show on prom night to win her affection. And he signs up to stop the sex pact when he sees the guy she’ll be sleeping with, knowing that she’s a closeted lesbian and will regret it. And Mitchell (John Cena) is a neurotic, overly-protective dad to his tomboyish daughter Kayla. He’s a hulking dude who won’t hesitate to put a kid through a wall if it means making sure his daughter doesn’t grow up too fast.
It’s a lot of leg work, but Cannon makes it feel natural, breezy and funny. And it culminates in some big moments once they finally make it to the bedroom. Some of the film’s pithier and filthier one-liners (the lesbian equivalent of a “beard” is a “merkin”) are as memorable as a scene of Cena butt-chugging beer and a nude Gary Cole wandering around his house blindfolded.
Blockers’ standout might be Cena. This is the kind of studio role I’d like to see Dwayne Johnson go back to playing. He’s much too much in the best way, bursting at the seams with worry and agitation as he tries to protect his kid. He’s convincing as the lame dad and willing to make a fool of himself in service of the story.
But Blockers works because of its ensemble, and the best of these movies thrive on finding good matches with unexpected faces. There have been studio comedies like this before, but not with this family.
3 stars