The parents of three teenage girls set out to scupper their daughters’ plans to lose their virginity on prom night: looking at its bare bones plot, Pitch Perfect writer Kay Cannon’s directorial debut doesn’t exactly scream “sex positive”. Yet, by aligning itself with its younger characters’ more open-minded sexual politics, this cheerfully ribald teen comedy updates the genre’s morally conservative convention.
Best friends Julie (Kathryn Newton), Kayla (Geraldine Viswanathan, a swaggering comedic presence) and Sam (Gideon Adlon) are the smothered princess, the stoner jock and the closeted goth respectively, and headed for college – but not before making #SexPact2018. When Julie’s overbearing mother, Lisa (Leslie Mann, brilliantly manic-edged), discovers the details of their master plan, she ropes in fellow parents Mitchell (John Cena) and Hunter (Ike Barinholtz) to “cock block” the girls.
Their anxieties range from everyday puritanism (Mitchell) to the fear that they’ll be tricked by young love (Lisa) to worries about peer pressure (Hunter). Cannon offers a range of vantage points, sometimes jackhammering this home a little hard in the dialogue. None of which is to say the film is lacking in pace, energy or laughs. There are jokes about manbuns, a sly cameo from comedian Hannibal Buress, and a great gag about misreading American Beauty. It’s a nice touch, too, that the girls deem Hailee Steinfeld’s 2015 pop hit Love Myself their anthem (a wink perhaps to the Steinfeld-starring teen comedy The Edge of Seventeen).
