DETENTION (2012) ½ *

A killer from a horror movie called Cinderhella is stalking a group of annoying teens.  After a classmate is murdered at a party, the Principal (Dane Cook) sentences a bunch of kids to detention to find out who the killer is.  There, they construct a time-traveling bear (don’t ask) to stop the psycho.

Detention is one of the most ADD movies I’ve ever seen.  This thing is all over the place.  The constant barrage of on-screen text while characters are talking, rapid-fire editing, and scattershot plot are off-putting, gaudy, and irksome.  Director Joseph Kahn is mostly known for directing music videos.  While these techniques might have worked for a three-minute music video, it quickly gets annoying in a ninety-minute movie. 

It tries to be a spoof of horror films, offering non-stop meta commentary on the slasher and teenage comedy genres.  However, it’s nowhere near as clever as it thinks it is.  It’s especially telling that Detention is trying too hard when the characters namedrop pop culture references like Bronson Pinchot and the filmmakers have to put up an on-screen graphic to remind you who he is.  It’s almost as if they weren’t confident the audience would get the joke.  Also, joking about dark material such as teenage suicide can be humorous if you find the right tone.  This movie thinks it is just too cool for school (no pun intended), so all the black humor lands with a cringey thud.  

The constant use of text and graphics popping up on screen while the characters talk directly to the audience often make it feel like a feature length YouTube video.  The slasher scenes could’ve worked had Kahn picked a genre and stuck with it, but since the characters are all irritating, it really doesn’t matter to us if they live or die.  The dumb and unnecessary plot detours (like the guy who has a TV for a hand) further gunk up the works.  I think it was about the time when they introduced the Freaky Friday subplot late in the game that I started to mentally tap out.

Is there any way to prescribe a movie Adderall?  Detention truly needs it.  Maybe the film was specifically tailored to people with ADD and ADHD because I couldn’t make heads or tails of it.