BOOKSMART (2019) * ½

Booksmart is essentially a female version of Superbad.  That isn’t the worst idea for a movie, but unfortunately, it’s a tone-deaf, clunky, and often times unbearable chore to sit through.  That’s mostly due to the insufferable batch of unlikeable screechy characters that we’re stuck with for 102 painful minutes. 

The film follows the time-honored high school comedy tradition of having two outcast best friends (Kaitlyn Dever and Beanie Feldstein) trying to get laid on the last night of school.  The big difference is that we have two women as our leads and one of them is a lesbian.  This could’ve worked, but there seems to be more of an emphasis on humiliation and heartbreak than anything, which runs against the grain of the silly early scenes.  

Those allegedly comedic scenes feel especially belabored and drawn out.  Working on the conceit that the girls don’t hang out with the popular kids, therefore have no idea where the party is, they must travel from lame party to lame party looking for the big kegger where all the cool kids are at.  All this does is eat up a lot of screen time, and worse, isn’t very funny.  (I think it was about the time the characters were using Harry Potter shit for pick-up lines that I started to mentally tap out.)

All Booksmart really did was make me feel old.  High school is a lot different now than when I went, that’s for sure.  Even though what the girls go through was far removed from my own experiences, the film does very little to make you care about them.  Movies like The Perks of Being a Wallflower and The Edge of Seventeen, while vastly different from my days of a teenager, still managed to engage and inform, while giving you characters you could relate to.  This movie has none of that.  

Even worse, is when it finally looks like the gay character has found a compatible match, she winds up vomiting all over her, which just seemed needlessly cruel.  First-time director Olivia Wilde handles these scenes of embarrassment and exclusion without much finesse, which makes them even more uncomfortable to watch.  The pacing especially drags in the second act as Wilde lumbers from one unfunny scene to another without much energy.  

The only real fun comes from a bizarre stop-motion drug trip scene in which our heroines are inexplicably transformed into Barbie dolls.  This sequence has a spark and edge to it that’s missing throughout the rest of the film.  Wilde’s husband, Jason Sudeikis is also good for a laugh or two as the dopey principal, but for the most part, Booksmart is rather witless.