Incoming (2024) Review!!

Synopsis – Four freshmen navigate the terrors of adolescence at their first-ever high school party.

My Take – Gone are the times when raunchy teen films like Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), Revenge of the Nerds (1984), American Pie (1999), and Superbad (2007) dominated screens and conversations.

Mainly as the tropes of these certain films became so popular that whatever came later felt like unappealing rehashes of something better. There are anomalies of course, like last year’s No Hard Feelings and Bottoms, but few have managed to break through the excess of endless mediocrity.

This latest attempt to revive the subgenre sees Netflix and first-time filmmaking siblings Dave and John Chernin, known for their works on sitcoms like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and The Mick, switch things around by bringing a Gen Z update of coming-of-age flicks.

The result is an entirely predictable high school comedy that despite not being original manages to be at least fun. Delivering enough laughs to carry us through 91 minutes of its runtime. The jokes are funny, mostly because they’re unafraid to rattle a little, a quality that many recent comedies overeager to pander to every member of the audience have forgotten to pull off.

Sure, it’s hardly award winning material, but the bar is just so low for these kind of films nowadays, that anything well served works.

The story follows four incoming high school first-year students: Benj (Mason Thames), Eddie (Ramon Reed), Connor (Raphael Alejandro), and Koosh (Bardia Seiri), as they grapple with peer pressure, social optics, and awkward romances ahead of and during their first high school party.

Benj, a former theater kid trying to rebrand, is in love with his older sister Alyssa’s (Ali Gallo) best friend Bailey (Isabella Ferreira), but she’s a sophomore and cool; Koosh needs to prove himself to his older brother Kayvon (Kayvan Shai), a sociopathic senior who regularly beats him up, by hooking up with someone; Connor expresses insecurity about not hitting puberty yet.

Meanwhile, Eddie detests his mother’s rich new boyfriend, Dennis (Scott MacArthur). With each student having their cross to bear ahead of the big high school party that will test their friendship and moral steel.

As one could predict, their night takes unexpected and usually embarrassing turns. And as mentioned above, the screenplay is chock-full of tried-and-true tropes: the geeky freshman, the grump sister, the wannabe ladies’ man, the blond queen bee. But the filmmakers manage a jaunty pace that energizes these familiar ingredients, more in the gag department than in the film’s superficial dramatic components.

Yes, the over-reliance on poop jokes for half the film admittedly burned through much of my goodwill, though not all of it.

As the directing duo of Chernin brothers prove more adventurous with various side personalities, including Bobby Cannavale as a friendly sad sack chemistry teacher that takes his students up on binge drinking at the party.

The character largely winds up a punching bag, but there are a few humorous curve balls when Cannavale plays the pathos of an adult whose social sphere is limited to the teenagers he grades.

The other involves Benj’s sister, Alyssa, who has recently gotten plastic surgery and is desperate to find out why her ex-girlfriend dumped her. This subplot, in particular, feels like it never quite lived up to its potential. However, its resolution surprisingly ties in with Koosh’s storyline toward the film’s end.

Although some might consider the boy’s problems silly, they ring true to the issues of young adulthood. Everything is magnified and intense and seems much worse than it is.

It helps that Mason Thames, Ramon Reed, Raphael Alejandro, and Bardia Seiri make a charming foursome of misfits, and you can’t help but root for them to get what they want. Bobby Cannavale’s natural comedic timing and charisma play an important part in making the film entertaining, and it ends just as bad as you think it will.

In other roles, Isabella Ferreira, Ali Gallo, Loren Gray, Kayvan Shai, Scott MacArthur, Victoria Moroles, Thomas Barbusca and Kaitlin Olson provide good support. On the whole, ‘Incoming’ is a predictable but fun teen comedy that delivers a few solid laughs.