Blockers


Blockers is a comedy about teenagers having sex, built for their parents’ generation, like a retooled Superbad. Three girls meet on the first day of school and grow up together, firm friends. We’re introduced to their parents – a worried mom, a huge jock given to weeping, and a drunk, and then we fast forward to the day of their prom.

This is the day the three of them decide to have sex, and after their parents discover this via the plot device of cross-device instant messaging, the three parents we were introduced to at the start head off in pursuit, trying to preserve their daughters’ maidenheads.

Well, two of them do: the drunk is opposed to their attempt to restrict their daughters. We see what is a distaff version of so many teen sex comedies, with added acceptance of lesbians, rather than just regular jockishness.

It all runs pretty much on rails – you’re never much in doubt of where the plot will go, but the journey is the thing. Without that, we wouldn’t have the wonderful sight of an aggrieved John Cena, bursting in on a satanic coven in a hotel room, and imploring them to “Play sports!”.

Or indeed the great phrase “I’m going to shove his fedora so far up his ass it’s going to be a hat.”

A film where a man has two and a half pints of lager poured up his butt was never going to be the height of distinction, but again, it has been designed to pluck the heartstrings as necessary. There’s a lengthy monologue by the drunk parent about the gloom and loneliness of never being able to connect with your children as much as you’d wish… played for laughs. It had me welling up with tears anyway, but maybe that’s a side effect of watching it at high altitude on a plane.

Other notable trivia: when the parents try to get a ride, it’s a Lyft, when presumably a few years ago it would have been Uber getting the product placement. Teens love the Lord of the Rings, getting high, and pop music. You can have a massive drunken party in a Chicago hotel without any consequences. And that’s about all I learned from this film.

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