17 Again (2024)

17 Again

Mike O’Donnell’s wife wants a divorce, his kids are distant, he did not get the job promotion he expected to get, and everything else in his life has gone wrong since that magic year when he was 17 years old, a basketball star, in love, and looked like Zac Efron instead of Matthew Perry. Clearly, this is a case for treatment by Body Swap Movie.

Visiting the cases with trophies at his former high school Mike meets a janitor who smiles at the camera in such way as if he knows more than humans do. If only could Mike have been again back to 17 but without repeating all those same errors. He can in “17 Again”. Falling into some sort of Twilight Zone wormhole emerges from it looking like Zac Efron. They say be careful what you wish for because you just might get it. Mike should have been more specific. Instead of wanting to be 17 again, he had wished to go back twenty years ago.

Yes indeed he becomes an individual trapped within the confined space of his own 17-year-old body himself. Same wife, same kids, same problems. Divorcing Old Mike had moved in with his best buddy Ned (Thomas Lennon) so finally now he throws himself on Ned’s mercy Will Ned pose as his father so Young Mike can pose as a son and help out contemporary children by entering this very school? It would appear that Ned also happens to be software millionaire middle-aged fanboy who will agree especially after having fallen hopelessly for Jane who is their high school principal.

Young Mike bonds really closely with Alex (Sterling Knight), his insecure son this time around. Later than meeting Scarlet (Leslie Mann), Alex’s mom obviously used to be his wife before leaving him for other men and getting married again before having a chance to enter an eternal spiral through time until becoming again that innocent girl she once was at seventeen. She finds it odd that he looks just like the boy she married in high school at the age of 17. He explains he is Old Mike’s uncle who I suppose should have been his brother, so it is really strange that Old Scarlet did not meet him but then if she does not ask why should I?

In high school, Young Mike again becomes a basketball star, befriends Alex, and tries to protect his Goth daughter Maggie (Michelle Trachtenberg) from her boyfriend who of course used to be the last person in school that would go out or be seen with a moody girl dressed in black.

I have seen Body Switches before (Tom Hanks in “Big”). The first act of this movie seemed all retread. Then it started to dig in. There are two love stories one must be tragic and the other comic according to Shakespeare. Young Mike still loves seriously his wife Scarlet when they were young while a New Scarlet falls for a double of her first love who is this teenage boy. She thinks it’s wrong, but he knows it isn’t how can he say this?

Meanwhile Ned his best friend courts Principal Masterson for the first time ever “teaching him what love means.” Before there was Darth Vader costume ecstasy. What happens on their first date I am not going to describe here except saying that Melora Hardin and Thomas Lennon perfect play is pure comic genius.

I was at a screening organized by a broadcasting station where most of the audience comprised young girls who had left their boyfriends behind. The trio in front of me shrieked as if there were buzzers on their seats when Zac Efron took off his T-shirt. A little older, he has obtained slight Tom Cruiseish charm and is much more self-confident. Why Matthew Perry was cast as his adult self is hard to figure; does your head change its shape in 20 years?

This is not a bad way to spend an hour and forty minutes in the theater, especially considering that this movie also has some unexpected turns and better acting than I thought it would. Mike gets sent into this vortex by the bearded old janitor with glee all over his face. This should come in handy one day, because Brian Doyle Murray’s janitor keeps a spare vortex or two around. Remember that smile? Yep, they are brothers.

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