Movie Info
Movie Info
- Run Time
- 1 hour and 42 minutes
- Rating
- PG
VP Content Ratings
- Violence
- 2/10
- Language
- 1/10
- Sex & Nudity
- 2/10
Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or
boastful or arrogant 5or rude. It does not insist on
its own way
1 Corinthians 13:4
Director Burr Steers and writer Jason Filardi’s fantasy comedy is a very mixed affair, affording several tender and funny moments sandwiched in between some preposterous events that all but the most naive will have trouble swallowing without gagging. Though bearing a slight resemblance to the classic Back to the Future, this tale of a despairing husband/father’s awakening falls far short of the earlier film..
The film opens with high school senior Mike O’Donnell (Zac Efron) expected to perform outstandingly in the big basketball game. He has a lot at stake because a scout from a major college is in the stands to watch him. However just as the coach is gathering the players Mike’s girlfriend Scarlett (Allison Miller) informs him that she is breaking up with him. This so stuns the boy that he cannot keep his mind on the play when the game begins. When he sees her walking out of the gym, he leaves the floor, catching up with her and pleading his case. Yielding to his passionate plea, she agrees to his proposal of marriage.
Twenty years later the adult Mike (now played by Matthew Perry) and Scarlett (Leslie Mann) are breaking up. She is fed up with his complaining about what might have been had he gone on to college. Mike moves in with his best friend Ned Freedman (Thomas Lennon), who was once the nerd that Mike had defended against bullies during their high school days. Now the nerd has become a millionaire, thanks to the software he had developed.
Paying an impromptu visit to his school, Mike gazes at the photo of his old basketball team on display. He talks with the janitor, who asks him if he would prefer to live back then. Later that night when Mike tries to stop the mysterious janitor from jumping off a bridge, he somehow is transformed into himself as he was at 17. His attempt to convince the alarmed Ned of his identity is amusing, and his subsequent enrolling at his old high school offers all sorts of unusual opportunities when he becomes the classmate of his teenage daughter Maggie (Michelle Trachtenberg) and slightly younger son Alex (Sterling Knight)—and then there is wife Scarlett, who is amazed at the striking resemblance between the new friend whom Alex brings home and that of her husband during his youth.
As stated before, some of the ensuing events are touching, as well as funny, and some are too unbelievable, the latter centering mainly around friend Ned, who has agreed to serve as Mike’s “father” in order for enrollment in school. That Jane Masterson (Melora Hardin), trained and sophisticated enough to become the school Principal would put up with Ned’s crude wooing of her is too much. Best part of the film is Mike’s growing awareness of the problems of the children he had so long neglected, and even more, of the way in which his self-centered longing for “what might have been” has affected Scarlett. As Luke put it in his parable of the wayward son, Mike “comes to himself” and emerges as a better person.