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Review: “High School Musical 3: Senior Year”
By Kyle | October 24, 2008
Teenage Wasteland
Kyle Smith review of “High School Musical 3: Senior Year”
1.5 stars out of 4
110 minutes/Rated G
I plan to be the father of a 9-year-old girl in about 8 1/2 years, so I went to see “High School Musical 3″ for a glimpse into my future. Chilling, chilling.
The weapons-grade Albuquerque wholesomeness of Zac Efron, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Tisdale and whoever plays the boy with all the hats is still brutally efficient. The girl-powered crowd I saw the movie with Wednesday night on 42nd Street squealed at the beginning and (less loudly) at the end, though maintaining an almost complete silence in the middle.
“It wasn’t bad,” ruled Victoria Testa, 12, a full-time kid. “Parts of it were a little overwhelming.” Would she see it again? “I don’t think so.” Her sister Olivia, 8, thought the movie could have used a few commercial breaks.
I’ll put it another way: The jokes are awful, the intrigue minimal (good girl Gabriella, played by Hudgens, doesn’t disappear at a climactic moment because of her enemy Sharpay’s witchy schemes - she simply walks away), the romance, except for 2.2 kisses near the end, implied. All of this is why it seems like there’s a long, long time between the musical numbers, which themselves are at the level of a Mentos commercial.
This time, the kids are mulling options for college. Gabriella got into Stanford but Troy (Efron) wants to play hoops at the U of A - or is that what his dad wants for him? Mull, mull. Dark moment: Troy in the gym, by himself, on a gloomy night, agonizing over his future as basketballs pour from the rafters and lightning flashes.
“It just started raining randomly,” notes Olivia Testa, although she could have been talking about a different random rainstorm, on a rooftop where Troy and Gabriella sing, “Let it rain/Let it pour/What we have is worth fighting for.”
As the kids plan a meta-musical called “Senior Year,” in which everyone will play himself or herself, their teacher springs a surprise: She has invited scouts from Juilliard. “HSM 4: The Moppets Take Manhattan”? Could happen. Chilling, chilling.
There’s a distinct energy shortage here compared to the first two films.
Every staging idea seems stale and the songwriters are running out of hooks, though the rock(-ish) song of (near-)anger Troy delivers is one of the few that rises above the mush.
None of the numbers approaches the bust-out inventiveness of the lunch scene in the first movie or the whimsy of the baseball bit in the second one. A brief taste of Bob Fosse’s moves doesn’t accomplish much. As Billy Wilder once put it, even for Albuquerque, this is pretty Albuquerque.
Sharpay’s haberdashery-obsessed brother Ryan again burns up the fedora catalog, coordinating the hats with his pink pants and his sur prisingly broad range of eye ball- scalding argyle sweaters. If his headgear budget had been halved, the movie could have afforded to hire a couple of joke writers to come up with better stuff than “I wouldn’t sing with you if I were starving and you were the last pickle at the picnic.” Or maybe a new lyricist: “Where’s my shaver/I look like a waiter”? Really?
Reassuring though it may be to parents that the kids inhabit a zit-free, hormonally unroiled state (despite being the same age as the characters in “Superbad” and “Grease”), there is also something surgically sterile. The movie sounds as though it was recorded in a padded chamber instead of a bustling school, and it looks like it came from some alternate world, one that basks in the eternal sunshine of the spotless skin.
Topics: Broadway, Movies, Music |
April 9th, 2009 at 3:45 pm
I watched the movie and i liked a lot of the movie . I wish i saw this movie not 8 years after high school. I love the gabriella rooftop romance doll and am going to perfect her look with the black high heeled shoes . I have high school high school musical 2 high school musical 3 card pack( the card pack features the hsm trilogy). I would love to get hsm3 extended edition.I want to emulate gabriella’s brainy character. I also like how the dolls for hsm films really resemble the character gabriella in all threee films . The merchandise for the film is eye -catshing. I have to excel at what I do like Gabriella. There are three gabriella dolls from hsm 3 that are not containing matching outfits. I want to tell you that I want to relive the moments in hsm 3 and hsm in real life by making my own dreams become realities -education, wardrobe, appearance , hobbies- of Gabriella . Gabriella wore the ideal dress to her prom( in the promos and a lot of her other outfits in the film stood out.The raining for Can i have this Dance is not rain , in fact the downpour of rain isn’t rain . The sprinklers provided the water. The capture showing the wildcat couples footwear splashing through the puddles of wqater was very cool. I love the trailer to hsm 3 , the scenes really show the summarization of the whole movie . I don’t remeber seeing troy spin around in the air with a basketball.
April 30th, 2009 at 3:10 am
` high school musical is so great, even my younger brother loved zac efron a lot…and also my cousins who used to dance and memorize the dance steps… thats why we are all addicted to this movie……
April 30th, 2009 at 3:15 pm
followup to my long message was that there was a lot of typos . I would love to see hsm 3 extended edition because it is a really great extension of some parts of senior year that are unknown .My sis should see it .