"It's times like these that you need to start thinking like a stoner," proclaims High School’s be-stoned underdog Travis Breaux (Sean Marquette). What Breaux didn't realize when he'd said these words (or what writer-director John Stalberg hadn't foreseen when he'd written them) was just how applicable that maxim would be for the audience.
I should say up front that I hold the stoner comedy in high esteem — damn it, that pun was unavoidable. Cheech and Chong are loveable, Pineapple Express is a piece of veiled genius, and Dude, Where's My Car? may be the Rosetta Stone that explains the choice of Ashton Kutcher to play Steve Jobs in an upcoming indie biopic. But High School is a bland pastiche of borrowed one-offs and comfortable tropes that shine brighter in those earlier flicks.
Briefly: Henry Burke is an uptight, straight-A student whose rekindled friendship with a childhood buddy (who is now a drifting stoner) leads him to try marijuana for the first time. The very next day, as luck would have it, a school-wide drug test is announced, and the only logical solution is to get the whole school high in order to preserve Burke's status as valedictorian.
I don't want to belabor the fact that High School's plot is silly (not in the good way, either) and the execution is just okay. The series of outrageous events — one OMG moment after another — quickly become boring in a way that reminds me of a Psychology lesson about habituation and desensitization. Very poor attempts, usually in the form of trite monologues, are made at making us care about Breaux (the stoner whom I can only imagine is very near and dear to Stahlberg's heart). Rather than empathize, I found myself sighing and rolling my eyes an unhealthy and inordinate number of times.
Alas! There is a guiding light in this slipshod love letter to high school stoners the world over: Michael Chiklis is astounding as Principal Gordon, a character that must have been separated at birth from Office Space’s Milton. Gordon would be the imposing, conniving, scheming older brother; a real careerist whose shit-eating grin and petrifying stare are two sides of the same hilarious coin.
Movies like High School use standard characters (blazed males, mostly), follow similar story arcs (a character sees his ordinariness justifiably confronted by some strange or as-yet-unexplained turn of events), and engage in slapstick and absurdity that can be charming when done right. Too bad then that High School’s revisionist take ultimately goes up in smoke.
This article appears in May 31 – Jun 6, 2012.