Another Teen Movie

Not that it came up often, but it seemed like whenever somebody mentioned the movie Can't Hardly Wait, they'd say it was pretty good, and gently encourage me to see it. It finally came up one time too many (or one time "just enough"), and at last I went for it.

This is a prime example of something being greater than the sum of its parts. As a script, the movie could only be a bigger cliché if it were actually a parody, in the style of Not Another Teen Movie. It's a movie about a giant teenage party populated with all the archetypes you remember from your own school... and have seen turned into caricature in other bad teen movies. You have the popular girls, the tech geeks, the jocks, the pining sensitive guy, the wannabe musicians, the posers, and more -- all illogically crammed into one party for the sake of a hearty movie broth.

The plot is a paint-by-numbers anthology of kids "learning to see other people for who they really are." You know, turf that lots of these movies have thoroughly covered. (Most notably, The Breakfast Club.)

And yet... it works. And the credit for that can go entirely to the cast. They're a really talented group of young (though not quite as young today) actors that, each and every one of them, pulls more from the material than is actually there. The more significant roles are played by Jennifer Love Hewitt, Ethan Embry, Lauren Ambrose, Peter Facinelli, and Seth Green, who all have appeared in better films and television shows since then, but still gave just as much effort here.

What's more, the extended cast is stuffed full of people who, though mostly unknown at the time, have gone on to appear in all sorts of things. There's Jenna Elfman, Jason Segel, Breckin Meyer, Donald Faison, Freddy Rodriguez, Jaime Pressly, Clea DuVall, Eric Balfour, Selma Blair, Sara Rue, Amber Benson, Jerry O'Connell... this was the veritable JFK of 90s teen actors. And each takes a few minutes -- or even a few seconds -- of screen time and scores a laugh.

So ultimately, it is a movie worth watching, even if it isn't really anything that fantastic. I rate it a B-.