Mild and inoffensive, though a tad too subversive to be considered harmless, Kenny Ortega’s High School Musical 3: Senior Year arrives in cinemas after the first 2 direct-to-Disney Channel films became massive hits on cable and DVD.
Firmly made for its built-in fanbase, the uninitiated certainly shouldn’t start here; the magical, wonderful, candyland High School world this film creates – where none of the characters smoke, drink, or use drugs, fight with their parents, have acne or struggle through puberty, are confident in their sexual identity, and romance ends with a snuggle (no kissing!) – is so patently bizarre that they might as well have set the film in an alternate reality like Mad Dog Time.
While young fans should be pleased, the lack of any real depth is alarming; this really pales beside the teen films from previous generations, up to and including the Beach Blanket Bingo series from the 60’s.
There’s no backstory here, but don’t worry if you haven’t seen the previous entries: all the characters are stereotypes and the situations cliché, so as long as you’ve seen any previous movie you’ll get the picture.
Zac Efron stars as Troy Bolton, high school hunk and basketball team captain, sharing a puppy love romance with good girl Gabriella Montez (Vanessa Hudgens) at trendy East High. Troy wins the Big Game for the Wildcats as the film opens, and then the story kind of peters out. It’s Senior Year, and Troy is getting offers to play basketball in college; or will he go for theatre at Juilliard? Will Gabriella stay with Troy or go to Stanford?
The answer to these questions, and not much more, is expressed through a number of song and dance routines that take place during Senior Prom and the big School Play and some other curious venues (a junkyard?)
Efron has legitimate screen presence but co-star Hudgens seems to disappear into the background scenery for much of the movie. Padding out the cast are your token minorities, African-American best friends of the main characters played by Corbin Bleu and Monique Coleman, who have absolutely nothing to do.
Also: there’s fabulous twins Sharpay (Ashley Tisdale) and Ryan Evans (Lucas Grabeel), pseudo-villains who are actually more sympathetic than the other characters (and the film knows this). I was astounded by the Ryan character, who is obviously intended as a homosexual stereotype, and yet because the topic of sex is never broached in this G-rated Disney movie, the film never explores this.
Always easy on the eyes, the choreography and costume design is actually quite impressive here (from something I was expecting cable-level quality). Music, however, is awful, every song instantly forgettable, and we just go on and on through an interminable 112 minutes.
While it’s unlikely that anyone over a certain age can enjoy the High School Musical films, they somehow have strong appeal to younger viewers. Crank up some decent tunes on your mp3 player if your kids drag you to this and I daresay you’ll have a good (or at least bearable) time.
Sample dialogue that no one needs to hear: “I wouldn’t sing with you if my hair was on fire and you were the last bucket of water on Earth.” What?
