Can't Hardly Wait Review
by A. Estey (gbv_adam AT hotmail DOT com)May 7th, 1999
Review of Can't Hardly Wait
Written by: Harry Elfont and Deborah Kaplan
Directed by: Harry Elfont and Deborah Kaplan
Rating: * out of ****
Movies about teenagers and teenage culture rarely prove to be either interesting, entertaining or convincing, because of one fundamental reason: movies are made by adults and not teenagers.
Occasionally, however, films like Say Anything, Dazed And Confused and The Breakfast Club will break the mold and offer genuine insight into the lives of those bizarre creatures which surround us called "teenagers." Can't Hardly Wait, however, does not. Instead, the writing/directing team of Harry Elfont and Deborah Kaplan manages to take every cliché found in the teenage genre, strip it completely of perception, intelligence and wit - and turn it into one of the most nauseating cinematic experiences I have ever been subjected to.
Can't Hardly Wait follows a group of characters as they attend a house party on the night of their high school graduation. The main characters are such perfected stereotypes that no analysis needs to be provided to perfectly understand them: there's the average male protagonist Preston (Ethan Embry), prom queen and cheerleader Amanda (Jennifer Love-Hewitt), football star Mike (Peter Facinelli), white rapper wannabe Kenny (Seth Green), computer geek William (Charlie Korsmo), and brainy outsider Denise (Lauren Ambrose).
I couldn't stand any of those characters. Whether it was William getting drunk and signing along to heavy metal songs or Kenny proclaiming "Yo, I gotta have sex tonight!", all I could think of was how Elfont and Kaplan possibly managed to con Columbia Pictures out of ten million dollars to fund their film.
Apparently, Can't Hardly Wait is supposed to be a comedy, but it tends to fail in this respect because of the fact that it's not funny. In all honesty, Elfont and Kaplan should be forced by their employers to attend remedial classes in humour. And when I say "forced", I mean it. They should be strapped down to a chair and have their eyes wedged open in a similar fashion to Alex in A Clockwork Orange. This is how desperately they need to be educated about the concept of humour. For instance, Can't Hardly Wait features a foreign exchange student who is instructed to repeat absurd statements such as "I am a sex machine." For some reason, Elfont and Kaplan believe that if this character repeats it enough, eventually it will be funny. If only Elfont and Kaplan could recognise the irony that they actually got paid for making this junk - now that's funny.
Reviewed by: A. Estey
Copyright 1999, by A. Estey ([email protected])
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