13 going on 30 (2024)

13 going on 30

For sure Jennifer Garner is all charm, that’s why she suffers a charmless treatment in “13 Going on 30” like those other body switch movies (like “Big,” “Vice Versa,” “Freaky Friday”, etc) where a child finds themselves in an adult’s shoes through magic. Coming out of Sundance, director Gary Winick had another movie in mind called Tadpole (2003), where a 16 year old boy was seduced by a 40-year-old woman and some of us wondered how well the plot would have worked with the reverse: A sixteen year-old girl was seduced by a forty-year-old man.

So now Winick does it, supplying a 13-year-old girl with a thirty-year old body and plopping her into bed with boyfriend who is also a professional hockey player. They end up making out but she thinks he is gross when they are doing their big kissing scene then it blacks out mercifully without telling us what happens next. Can you be guilty of statutory rape caused by magical body-switching?

When she was still young Jenna Rink (played by Christa B. Allen) gets to meet the most popular girls in school for being pushed around as long as she can become one of them herself. (There’s better version of this angle in “Mean Girls,” which opens next week.) She throws a party in her rec room, and the mean girls play an ugly trick on her, which makes her start treating Matt her only real friend a fat kid from next door pretty badly.

Then someone sprinkles some magic dust over her I don’t think we should examine this so that she finds herself being 30 years old living in New York editing Poise magazine while resembling Jennifer Garner. Now Lucy, who used to be quite snide back at high school, works together with her as coworkers but not really friends because the movie would like us to believe that career women are bound to backstab each other.

In the best examples of this genre, adult actors get to act as if they’re inhabited by kids. Tom Hanks did this about as well as it can be done in “Big,” and I also liked Judge Reinhold in “Vice Versa” and of course Jamie Lee Curtis in the 2003 version of “Freaky Friday.” Strangely enough, “13 Going on 30” doesn’t hang around scenes like that, maybe because Jenna is a high-powered Manhattanite who has to learn fast. So most of the movie isn’t really about a 13-year-old living inside an adult’s body; rather it concentrates on a power struggle at the magazine and Jenna trying to mend fences with Matt (now played by Mark Ruffalo).

He will not cooperate. Supposedly she lost those last seventeen years but just can’t remember them. What reason does he have for believing that she is any different now since after her disastrous party in the rec room she never spoke with Matt again? She’s almost desperate for lack of real friends, yet Matt is engaged to be married and whatever happens in the timeline that could address this conflict dwarfs Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind into Doris Day romance.

This movie isn’t something we should be arguing about logically. The magic is bought because it is part of the package. However, I couldn’t buy the world of the office or those embarrassing scenes where high-powered professionals behave as though they don’t realize that they are dealing with a 13-year-old brain. Jenna’s brilliant suggestion for a magazine overhaul is so bad on all accounts that it must have been forced upon actors at gunpoint by the scriptwriters.

Incidentally, this film was written by Cathy Yuspa and Josh Goldsmith, a duo who also co-wrote “What Women Want” (2000), which was an altogether better office comedy featuring Mel Gibson who could hear women’s thoughts in his office. Now, there aren’t any minds to read here.

We understand why Jenna falls for grown up Matt (he has gone from being chubby to handsome over time) but there is no mention as to whether he ever fully realizes that she’s still the girl he knew when she was thirteen or how or why or when can a kid of 13 fall in love with a guy who is already 30 years old and all else (anyway, not in this picture). This could have been a musical since evading these emotional and sexual conundrums sometimes felt like tap dancing on raw eggs.

Watch 13 going on 30 For Free On Gomovies.