The new film “Take Me Home Tonight,” set in 1988, makes me wish we could travel back in time to the ’70s.
The movie’s lead character, played by Topher Grace, is much better suited and a lot funnier in his “That ’70s Show” role.
But let’s be real. Nothing about the 1980s premise in this movie feels authentic. Sure the characters have big hair, gaudy fashion sense, and cliche social statuses, but like everything else in this film, it feels forced.
The story centers around Grace’s character, Matt, who has just graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is unsure what to do after graduation. Matt returns home to Los Angeles to figure out his life while working at a video store.
Now there’s nothing really wrong with this scenario, but the film prompts me to think that Matt must be some kind of loser. And Matt himself believes he’s a loser, so he lies to his high school dream girl about his occupation.
Enter a ridiculous, unbelievable farce of a plot that is much less interesting than Matt’s quest for a job.
Matt runs into the girl of his dreams, Tori (a pretty boring Teresa Palmer), and instead of admitting the horrible, horrible truth that he works at a video store, he lies and tells her he works at the Goldman Sachs’ L.A. branch.
Travel forward in time past some inane and painful jokes, and Matt ends up at a party thrown by his high school enemy — Tori just happens to be there.
The thing I don’t get is why so many movie characters just can’t seem to get over high school. A good four or five years after high school, Matt still lusts after Tori, and for some reason, the writers of this movie thought this creepy and exhausted plot formula would make for a great feature-length film.
The plot does, in a lot of ways, mirror the plot of 2007’s “Superbad.” But that was a much better film, and the characters were still in high school, unlike the characters in “Take Me Home Tonight,” who really just need to get on with their lives after high school.
If these characters had, then I wouldn’t have had to watch this terrible movie in the first place.
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Conventional plot bogs down ‘Take Me Home Tonight’
Daily Emerald
March 5, 2011
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