This film should almost be titled “John Hughes Made It Look So Easy”.

I’ve come to the conclusion that sitting down to watch any film aimed at teenagers if you aren’t a teenager is a dangerous proposition. The proposition gets infinitely more dangerous if you’re watching it outside of the era it was made. The tropes and flourishes are all geared to be very much ‘of-the-moment’, and when the moment passes…look out.

What’s worse is that a writer like John Hughes became a genre unto himself, so he became the style writers and directors tried to copy. The problem is that the wannabe’s weren’t missing by inches…they were missing by miles, and giving audiences movies as lame as THREE O’CLOCK HIGH.

I never got bullied as a teenager, so this film gave me nothing to latch on to. Even if I was still working through a traumatic past of being bullied with a whole team of psychiatrists, I doubt this film would have anything for me since the idea is so thin (Geek gets bully’s attention – spends all day knowing he’s getting his ass kicked at 3pm). Sure, the idea is to take an average high school day and drop in this catastrophic event for our lead geek Jerry. But it’s only the day that’s supposed to be average…not the whole damned movie.

The “averageness” of the movie is at its worst with the actors on screen. Nobody is memorable – not the geek, not his friend, not the principal, not the bully. Think back to any other high school movie or TV show – they tend to make those roles memorable, right? Hell, think back to your own time in high school! Even if you didn’t know them personally, these sorts of people made an impression on you. In this film however, they are just…”there”.

The interesting thing, is that in the slightest of ways, the film is a precursor to NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN. As Ellis tells Tom Bell near the end of that film, “You can’t stop what’s comin’…it ain’t all waiting on you. That’s vanity”. It’s the same lesson that Jerry has to learn in this movie. No matter what he does – pull the fire alarm, try to run, send someone else to stick up for him – all he is doing is postponing the inevitable. Sure Jerry doesn’t deserve to be taken apart for merely touching a bully, but to paraphrase William Munny “We all have it coming…’deserve’ has nothing to do with it”.

So maybe…just maybe…if you dropped actors like Jon Cryer or Judd Nelson or Jeffrey Jones into this film, you could create something with legs. Perhaps with them, and let’s say Cameron Crowe as a writer, you might have the teenaged version of HIGH NOON. But by filling it out with talent that was only “good enough”, the filmmakers made something forgettable.

Appropriate, since I find myself not really wanting to wail on this film…I just want to forget about it and move on.