120 min | R | September 29, 2023 | Lionsgate
Molly Singer is a college dropout whose lawyer father pays her to go back to school and turn his nervous teenage intern into a party animal. The premise promises chaos and a little heart. It delivers a montage you have already seen.
Molly Singer is a hard-partying college dropout who fails her way through adulthood. Her father is a high-powered lawyer who needs his anxious, friendless intern to survive freshman year. So he hires Molly to go back to college and mentor the kid into a social life. Andy Palmer’s film is a redemption comedy that runs on a contradiction it never examines. It asks the audience to root for a woman whose entire arc is teaching a vulnerable teenager to drink, lie, and party his way to confidence.
Britt Robertson plays Molly with manic energy and an appealing recklessness that the script keeps sanding down. She commits to the binge-drinking gags and the pratfalls, but the role gives her nothing underneath the chaos. Ty Simpkins plays Elliot, the awkward intern, with a tentativeness that reads as genuine. The pairing should generate friction and instead generates beats the audience can predict from the first scene. Nico Santos and Cierra Ramirez work the edges as Paulie and Lindsay, and Jaime Pressly turns up as Brenda to do more than the writing earns. The cast is more capable than the material that surrounds them.
Palmer directs from a script by Todd M. Friedman and Kevin Haskin, and the construction is the central failure. The film stitches together party montages, hangover montages, and reconciliation montages with a needle-drop soundtrack doing the emotional work the scenes refuse to do. The college campus is shot in flat, bright daylight that flattens every location into the same anonymous quad. The editing leans on the montage as a crutch because the screenplay has no second gear. Every gag arrives on schedule and lands exactly as expected.
This is a back-to-college comedy assembled from parts the audience has seen in better movies. The premise contains a real idea about arrested development and the lies adults tell teenagers about belonging. The film notices none of it. It settles for a familiar shape and fills that shape with energy instead of insight, and it mistakes the noise for a story.