Hola all. Massawyrm here.
Leave it to Disney to take the single most sexually charged night of adolescence and neuter it to the point of being nothing short of a two hour commercial for Prom products. And that’s exactly what they did in their half-baked prom drama, brilliantly titled PROM. Not that I expected anything different, but being a fan of teen comedies – having been as surprised as everyone else by films like CAN’T HARDLY WAIT, MEAN GIRLS, EASY A, and 10 THINGS I HATE ABOUT YOU – I was holding out hope that this might have been a little something better than what it is. Sadly, it’s a film trapped between two worlds, one being the sterile, cotton candy environment that is Disney live action filmmaking and the other that of a team really trying to make something good.
This isn’t a bad film. But it is also never a very good one. Directed by onetime geek hopeful Joe Nussbaum (GEORGE LUCAS IN LOVE, SLEEPOVER, SYDNEY WHITE), you can feel where he’s desperately trying to make a solid teen film. Of course he is hamstrung the whole way by such a milquetoast premise. For a film titled PROM, it isn’t really much about prom at all; it is about the lead up to prom with about 10 minutes of Prom at the tail end. In this way it is very much like the high school girls it is targeted at – a lot of buildup leading to nothing but a weak climax that we’re told the whole time was supposed to be magical.
Look, I’ve been to a number of proms in my life – seven to be exact – and I’ve played the role of almost every character in this type of film. I’ve been the jilted date, the last minute platonic white knight, the bad boy daddy didn’t like, the lovesick friend, the guy who gets luckier than he has any right to and even one stint as the guy in the teen sex comedy about to score if only the universe would stop fucking with him. I’ve prom-partied until dawn on a week’s worth of nights and the one thing I can tell you definitively about prom is that the interesting stories aren’t the ones about the run-up to the night – the good stories come from the night itself. And that’s where this film goes terribly wrong. Instead it sets up the promise of this magical night where anything can happen and everyone ceases to be who they were for the previous four years (according to the film) only to show us some lame dance punctuated with all too clean and easy conclusions to all the paint-by-numbers plot points they’ve painstakingly established.
PROM is a collection of several tangentially connected stories about people who all go to the same high school – most of whom barely know each other – all caught up in sexless teen romances drawn from the clichés presented in other, better films. Every story has a predictable outcome with the film offering no surprises, even for the teen audience it is geared for. It exists in a universe where every boy goes to extreme lengths to ask his date to the dance and a girl like Aimee Teegarden somehow can’t find one. And most of the time it is harmless fantasy. But occasionally it becomes frustratingly stupid as it focuses so wildly on its premise that it sells its characters short.
In one infuriating scene, a character trying desperately to find someone – anyone – to go to prom with him is confronted with what might be his dream girl, only to discover she promised to go with a friend, but would have loved to go with him instead. And instead of asking her out on, you know, a real date, they simply wrap the scene up with a tidy little bow and an Oh, well, maybe in an alternate universe we would have been a scorching couple. Because prom is what this film is about, and if you can’t get the girl to prom, it simply wasn’t meant to be.
To look at the cinematography and performances Nussbaum gets out of this, you’d think he was shooting THE BREAKFAST CLUB or PRETTY IN PINK – but the stories here are pure Disney Channel nonsense, selling little girls the daydream of some magical world that doesn’t really exist. There are no hotel after-parties; no snuck in booze; no late night diner runs; no girls sitting on purse patrol wishing someone would ask them to dance; no chaperones keeping the dancing appropriate; and no one sees the light of dawn. It could be any dance for all we know – except that Aimee Teegarden won’t shut up about the “magic of prom,” despite the fact that the one she spearheads looks nothing like a real prom at all.
And all of that would have been fine if we’d been given anything resembling an interesting story. But we aren’t. This isn’t a teen comedy – it is the forgettable teen fluff we have come to expect from Disney these days. Hard to believe this is the same studio we were crowing about half a decade ago for having gotten away from all this. While appropriate for tweens, there’s nothing that will easily hold the attention of anyone much older than that. If your daughter wants to go, let her see it with friends and pray that she is gullible enough to believe that all this is what prom is *really* supposed to be about.
Until next time friends,
Massawyrm
