13 Going On 30 Review
by Jon Popick (jpopick AT sick-boy DOT com)April 23rd, 2004
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I love me some Jennifer Garner. I might love her more than her own parents do. Get between me and Alias, and you'll have a real problem on your hands, Bub. Sometimes, when I'm not watching Alias, I look up on the wall at Garner's Elektra poster from Daredevil and pretend she's starring in whatever crappy show I have on. Sometimes I look at that same Elektra poster, and then at my Tomb Raider poster, and imagine Lara Croft and Elektra duking it out in my living room, while I play with my Lego.
But enough about me. Let's talk about how frigging god-awful Garner's new 13 Going On 30 is. I mean, it'd have to be really god-awful for me - a borderline Garner stalker - to speak ill of, wouldn't it? Yet here I am, telling you Going is god-awful. And here's something even worse: Garner is god-awful in it. But she still looks really nice, and that's the only thing that kept me from bolting out of the theatre like I had diarrhea.
Going starts way back in the mid '80s, where little Jenna Rink (Christa B. Allen) is celebrating her 13th birthday. Jenna desperately wants to be part of a Heathers-type clique called Six Chicks, and she'd do just about anything to accomplish this important feat. That would include giving the hook to her chunky best friend Matt (Jack Salvatore, Jr.), who spent weeks creating a very special, personalized birthday gift for the ungrateful, brown-nosing Jenna. A disastrous round of Seven Minutes in Heaven later, Jenna loudly announces her hatred toward Matt, declares her wishes to be 30, and thanks to some pixie dust, she wakes up as Garner the next morning.
I know you're all thinking about Big right now, but Going doesn't have nearly as much going for it as it would need to deserve the comparison. In Big, Josh Baskin wished and woke up as an adult, only no time passed between those two events. In Going, Jenna wishes and wakes up as an adult, but it's 17 years later. And that means that, in addition to the regular fish-out-of-water stuff, we also have to deal with various - but frustratingly inconsistent - time and setting adjustments. Jenna isn't at all freaked out by a cordless phone but just about craps herself over a cell. She has no problems using a computer, holding her liquor, or dealing with her "first" menses (the latter, had the filmmakers chosen not to ignore it completely, could have been an actual teaching tool for Going's target audience, instead of spoon-feeding them the tired "be nice to your friends" message).
In Big, it wasn't really a stretch to believe Josh could get a job test-marketing toys. In Going, Jenna re-designs an entire fashion magazine from the ground up, amidst sabotage attempts, no less. And if you can swallow that bullshit, there's a lot more of it to gobble up. Like when Jenna realizes what has happened and runs, inexplicably, into the arms of the adult Matt (Mark Ruffalo, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), a guy she hated more than anything else in the world during her last cognizant moment. Like Jenna befriending her nauseatingly convenient 13-year-old neighbor. Like those horrifying "Thriller" (which you know is coming, thanks to the trailer) and "Love is a Battlefield" dance sequences (which you get blindsided by). Like Matt being a hip Greenwich Village photographer who wears a CBGB t-shirt.
And then there's Jenny/Jenna, whose performance is so forced, over-the-top and, at times, wincingly awful, there isn't a sane person alive who won't be saying, "So that's why Tom Hanks got an Oscar nomination for Big." You'd expect this kind of train wreck from the writing team that brought us What Women Want (turns out they want the same thing as Men - their money and time returned to them), but Going also has the misfortune of being the film that could derail the previously promising career of Gary Winick, who wrote/directed/produced films like Tadpole, Pieces of April, The Tic Code and Personal Velocity. In terms of Winick's involvement, Going is akin - though not quite as bad - to Kevin Smith crapping out Jersey Girl. And when that's your standard bearer, you're in big trouble.
1:37 - PG-13 for some sexual content and brief drug references
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