Blockers

Every now and then, a movie comes along that shoves the reality of how old you are in your face, and rubs it in with an hour and a half of sex jokes, gaffes about genitals and a generic storyline about teens trying to lose their virginity prom-night, “American Pie” style. It’s become my reality that maybe I’m just too old to laugh at this kind of humour anymore, and watching parents trying to cock-block their teenage girls sounds funnier on paper than it plays out.

That’s not to say “Blockers” is all bad, but after one particular puke-tastic scene, there was a mass walkout in our cinema, largely of audience members above the age of 40 – leaving me wondering (Carrie Bradshaw style), in this day and age are we just at the point of wanting more?

“Blockers” introduces us to three parents – Lisa (Leslie Mann), Hunter (Ike Barinholtz) and Mitchell (John Cena) – and their respective teenage daughters – Julie (Kathryn Newton), Sam (Gideon Adlon) and Kayla (Geraldine Viswanathan). The three parents have together watched their daughters grow up through friendship from the start of school to their now Prom Night. When Lisa catches wind of a supposed “Sex Pact” between the three girls, she enlists the 2 fathers to stop them making the “greatest mistake of their lives” (her words, not mine), essentially ‘cock blocking’ the girls.

What follows is a quest while the parents chase down where their daughters are at, from the prom to the many after parties. Confronting alcohol-infused limo puking, inadvertently watching Julie’s boyfriend’s folks go at it on the couch, fondling Gary Cole’s man bits and a car crash, the trio will give up at nothing to cock block their daughters.

Essentially this movie is the “American Pie” for adults, but it reeks more of the forgettable “American Pie 7”, in which the jokes aren’t clever and the film just feels like part of a franchise of films, and just shouldn’t have been made. It’s weak humour at best, but in saying that if you find continuous jokes about teenagers saying shocking things you’d never want to imagine your own daughter saying – then this is the film for you.

It also fails in being grounded – the flick really does have the potential for some sweet parent-daughter moments, but instead throws puke all over them (quite literally) and instead shows 3 adults who are past their use-by-date and instead of bonding with their kid, decide to be more of a prison-warden influence instead.

Look, it’s not all bad. Cena is the perfect addition to the modern comedy, and provided most of the laughs (for me anyway, everyone else in the cinema laughed all the way through). Overall, the acting isn’t at fault in “Blockers”. Again, I could be getting to be more of a prude in my old age but jokes about anal fluid just tend to make me cringe more than laugh. It’s not clever, it’s not witty – it’s juvenile and in saying that, I still can’t quite work out who the target audience is.

If you want mindless humour, go see it. Just maybe don’t take your mum.