Coffee_in_the_Clink Review of Blockers

Blockers (2018)

Starts off promising but runs out of ideas fast and just becomes repetitive

[3/10 · 19 March 2020]

There'll never be another "American Pie". But for the first twenty minutes of "Blockers" I held hope. Intially sceptical of John Cena's presence, he was brilliant, and the three girls who make a pact to lose their virginity on prom night were very funny and charming characters. Unfortunately, "Blockers" ends up stumbling over the hurdles that any sex-comedy like this should set out to avoid; sentimentality and attempting to circumvent gender notions - it's ok for boys to have sex, but not ok for girls. Initially the film avoids this by not taking itself seriously and just running along, raising a few laughs and is carried by the strength of its actors. But then the sentimentality and gender notions become overpowering; the over-protective father is a well-worn trope not only in film but in general society, and although Cena does it well it nonetheless becomes cringe-worthy and very repetitive. Leslie Mann's character was extremely irritating and her over-protectiveness of her daughter gets to the point where it's not funny and I found myself thinking, surely it will stop now. But it goes further and further to the point that she is under the bed when he daughter is about to have sex, in a scene that would illicit laughter any other time but by this stage it was just embarrassing and another miss-hit. The characters were there and the opportunity to make a female version of "American Pie" was very much possible but it all went flat very quickly and never recovered.