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Can't Hardly Wait Review by Harry I’m
not a huge fan of teen movies, but there is the odd time when they truly
do manage to be funny. Such is the case with Can’t Hardly Wait, which
is, in my opinion, the best teen movies of the nineties. (Does it rival
Footloose? Who knows?) The
cast is great, jam-packed with a who’s who of the up-and-coming teen
stars or ex-child stars of the past, then some weird cameos that don’t
make any sense, and a really good script. It’s hard to pack this many
storylines into one movie, and keep them all interesting, and at the same
time, keep us remembering all of them. Other movies have done the
intermingling storyline thing, but only this movie has had so many running
at once, and kept them all funny. About seven or eight characters are
introduced to start the movie, but there’s fifty billion more side plots
that are just as funny, because those characters just kind of float around
and make trouble for everyone else. If they’re not in the scene, you can
see them in the background, and that’s what makes this movie awesome.
It’s not a movie where only two people are on the screen at once.
Everyone is everywhere and still, you can remember them all. In
a nutshell, a guy named Preston is in love with a guy named Amanda. He
goes to a party with the intentions of falling in love with her because
her boyfriend Mike has broken up with her after graduation. These are not
one plot. There are three separate plots, as we follow Preston trying to
talk to her, failing and running away, Amanda trying to go to a party
where she’s not popular anymore, and Mike suddenly realizing that he’s
a loser and shouldn’t have broken up with Amanda. Still, these three
characters aren’t on the screen together for any real amount of time.
But there’s other plots. Preston brought his friend Denise, who hates
everything, but he ditches her there. She ends up sleeping with a guy
named Kenny who went to the party to have sex for the first time (which
later stemmed off American Pie, in my opinion). He sums up his intentions,
speaking like a poser with a lollipop in his mouth, and says “Man, I
gotta have sex tonight”. He’s also played to the fullest by Seth
Green. Mini plots surrounding these people involve the guy with the
brownie, the girl who decides she has to sleep with anybody to get back at
her boyfriend, Kenny’s poser friends, Mike’s crew’s plan to break up
with all their girlfriends so they can be free all summer. But these
characters aren’t all. Oh no. There’s also a geek named William who
goes to the party to get back at Mike for years of humiliation, but ends
up getting drunk and become the coolest guy in school (for a night). All
these plots (and more) are hilarious, and mesh together so well because it
all takes place over three hours. It’s fast paced humor, and it melds
together the two cinematic styles of comedy that usually only take one to
define a movie. Some movies are all about a story, and the telling of that
story is what’s truly funny, and others are all about a situation, and
quick scenes bombard you with jokes hoping you’ll laugh at some of them.
This movie has both. It’s smart, and doesn’t hesitate to point out
exactly how stupid all of the teenagers are for being at this party. Kids
are stupid. This movie gets that point across thirty times better than
that creepy movies called “Kids” did. Overall,
this is one of the better movies I’ve ever seen. It’s mature in its
immaturity, and that’s what makes it such a classic.
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