Barely passable entertainment for anyone in the market for a
Diary of a Wimpy Kid rip-off, Middle School: The Worst Years of My Life is
an undemanding 90-minute tween sitcom. Aside from the programming on
Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel, there’s little in the way of live action
antics for kids to enjoy, so in that limited sense this fits a niche. But
somehow I bet even children will find the whole picture drifting with the
whiffs of second-hand inspiration. Based on a book series by James Patterson
and Chris Tebbetts, it takes a familiar route.
There’s a lead kid, a middle schooler who likes to draw and narrates his
misadventures with family, friends, and teachers. But unlike Greg Heffley, the
constantly embarrassed Ben Stiller type anchoring the Wimpy movies, Middle School
has a protagonist who is mostly confident and the coolest rebel in school. His
problems aren’t internal so much as a constant barrage of awful adults ruining
his fun. Rafe Khatchadorian, the silliest kids’ book character name I’ve heard
in ages, breezes into a new school ready to take on the establishment, willing
to wage a covert prank attack on the stuffy suits and the petty rules.
I don’t know what made me feel older while watching this
movie. For a while I thought it would be that I found the adults perspective
more relatable and reasonably amusing while the kids were simply going through
a hackneyed plot with obvious beats. But then, late in the picture, a girl
patiently explains what a VCR is and that did it. I’m officially watching these
young people movies through old eyes. Maybe that’s why I took the most delight
in seeing comedian Andy Daly play the rules-obsessed principal. He has a way of
smoothly projecting bland competence while oozing condescension and being
totally transparent about his insecurities. It’s funny enough. His second in
command is Retta, who here is the exact opposite of her Parks & Rec free spirit, snapping at students to keep them in
line and getting the obligatory
knocked-over-by-hundreds-of-balls-falling-from-a-closet gag. Elsewhere is the
only teacher we meet, a trying-too-hard-to-be-cool-and-relatable one (Adam
Pally). Then there’s Rafe’s warm single mother (Lauren Graham) with a
monstrously dumb boyfriend (Rob Riggle). They all seem to be enjoying
themselves.
The grown-ups have the mild eccentricities and heavy
lifting, but the kids aren’t so bad. They’re likable enough. Rafe (Griffin
Gluck) slowly pulls back some layers on his tween bravado, revealing some real
emotional pain fueling his rebellion. Doing respectable work with their
stereotypes are his silly friend (Thomas Barbusca), his crush (Jessi Goei), and
his precocious little sister (Alexa Nisenson, who gets the cutest quips, but is
also good in a surprisingly dramatic scene late in the game). They get some
good lines, and the young audience won’t care so much that the adults in the
crowd will be restless. The kids fit the movie’s tone as a light, soft, well
meaning, and generally genial kids’ comedy. It even has some unobjectionable
ideas to impart. His sketchbook drawings may come to life in distracting
animated daydream interludes, too dull and flavorless to really add to the
narrative, but there’s something nice about his artistic spirit. It adds to the
movie’s basically harmless messages of self-empowerment, creativity, teamwork,
and appropriately mild anti-authoritarian impulses.
What is middle school but a time to start chafing against
the restrictions of childhood? A movie like this lets the tween id run free in
(mostly) squeaky clean safe environments where nothing too bad will ever
happen. Rafe can put sticky notes all over the school or fill a trophy case
like an aquarium, dye his principal’s hair, shred standardized tests, or fill
the sprinkler system with paint. But it’s all for a good cause in this
comfortably consequence-light vision of the world. (And the pranks are so
unwieldy and impractical there’s little worry of kids copying. Not that that’ll
necessarily stop them from trying.) Of course it’s a movie with some instantly
dated cultural references (like a tired swipe at the Kardashians) and booming
contemporaneous pop music. It’s also a movie with a chaste crush, a few implied
profanities, and a final comeuppance for the meanest adult including a wagon
full of manure. Directed with a brisk, bright, bland style by Paul Blart’s Steve Carr from a
screenplay by Kara Holden (a Disney Channel Original Movie veteran), the movie’s
not worth getting worked up over. It does about what you’d expect at the level
you’d assume, no better and no worse.
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