Why Can’t Hardly Wait is not a very good teen film

Came across this little piece I wrote a few years ago for a friend's website, and it made me smile, so I thought I'd share it.

WARNING: DON'T BOTHER READING IF YOU ARE A DIEHARD FAN OF THIS FILM, IT'LL ONLY UPSET YOU.

Why Can’t Hardly Wait is not a very good teen film

This seems to be a favourite of my friends', but I bet this is only because they were about 14 when they first saw it and for nostalgic reasons it has a certain place in their heart. I can understand that, I was 11 when I saw Goldeneye in the cinema and I have seen it many times since and still rate as the second best Bond film below Goldfinger. It’s still a cracking good action film even today and it’s a lot more fun to watch than From Russia with Love, which is the official film buff’s top Bond film because it is probably the most realistic Bond film and has that classical cinema feel to it (in other words it can get a bit long-winded at times), not to mention Sean Connery at the top of his game, but is dragged down a bit by it’s datedness and now quaint-looking sequence action sequences (except the fight on the train, that’s still good).

But Can’t Hardly Wait isn’t as good as From Russia with Love or Goldeneye, it’s a supremely cheesy, twee piece of kiddie-pap that has a saccharine taste that is as insufferably American as not giving a *beep* about any country other than “God’s Country”. This truly is Happy Meal cinema, it makes American Pie look like The Last Picture Show. The characters in film are supposed to be about 17-18 but most audiences that age would find this far too patronising and naïve, this is more suited to teenagers that have yet to experience intoxication.

I don't know if Can't Hardly Wait is just dated or was already a really stale collection of US teen movie clichés and 'teen-speak' dire-logue when it come out back in 1998 (After Scream 1&2, I Know What You Last Summer and Clueless, but before American Pie, Cruel Intentions and She's All That) but it's definitely one of the lamest teen flicks of the 90s, a clunky rites-of-passage high school film set just after graduation, the time where American teenagers party, shag, promise to maintain/or just finish old relationships and get nostalgic about their school days just before they all head off to college, it desperately wants to be Dazed and Confused, a film I wasn't a huge fan of when I first saw, but now seems far better by comparison, it least it captured some of the feel of that adolescent milestone. If you've already seen most of the films mentioned above, there's really no need to watch this, unless you feel like a bit of teen movie who's who star-spotting, in that sense this is like The Player of teen flicks. First billed (though not used much) is Jennifer Love Hewitt, who has yet to even appear in a half-decent film (at least Tara Reid has The Big Lebowski and Jerry O’Connell has Stand By Me (please don’t mention Jerry *beep* Maguire)), and by the way Heartbreakers is only worth watching if you’re on a plane and have nothing else to do.

The real protagonist of the story is Ethan Embry (where is he now?) whose character is a guileless gimp who acts like a bigger stalker than John Hinckley, than there’s that cow from Six Feet Under who plays a similar type here, Seth Green in full-on geek mode (less like the charming comic actor he is at his best, more like the peculiar little scrote he is at his worst), and also Breckin Meyer, Selma Blair, Melissa Joan Hart, Clea DuVall, Jamie Pressley, Sean Patrick Thomas (Cruel Intentions, Save the Last Dance), Donald Faison (Clueless), Chris “Shermanator” Owen, Eric Balfour (the seedy looking creep from Six Feet Under and early episodes of Buffy), Jenna Elfman (that lanky blonde trout from Dharma and Greg) and Jerry O’Connell who lends his thespian heft to show the cocky jock that jocks don’t always have it made after high school. It’s saying something when HE was the most experienced actor in the whole cast when this was made.

When the ending captions that tell us what became of these youngsters in later life appear (a staple of coming-of-age cinema since American Graffiti) we find out that the sheltered nerd becomes a software tycoon who is dating a supermodel, and the bullying jock gains 40 pounds and works at a car wash. This kind of message brings to mind Harvey Pekar’s diatribe against Revenge of the Nerds in the American Splendor film (about it being an idealised empowerment piece for social outcasts who stand no chance of real success in life unlike the privileged characters in the film). As an antidote to this teenybopper mushfest, I propose that Ken Loach makes his own version; "Cannet Hardly Weet, Man: Aye, like fook!", set in a Northern mining town in the middle of the Thatcher years, where the graduates of the local comprehensive are about to face a grim future.