Before anything is said, I recommend everyone experience Detention as I did. Watch the trailer for this movie. It's only two minutes long, so you can spare the time.
Have you done it? Did you note the tired plot and crappy animation? Did you mentally outline the ending? Do you already hate this movie? Yes? Good.
Now go see the film anyway. Witness a modern version of Scream's opening scene – this time with the pretty victim texting her killer as she breaks the fourth wall and talks about her life, which is immediately cut short. And as the film continues, watch your jaw progressively drop as you're proven wrong.
Whoever cut Detention's trailer did a shitty job. You're expecting typical teen slasher trash, and you're given horror/sci-fi/parody/comedy/anarchy in its place. The basic (and boring) premise involves a group of teenagers stuck in Saturday detention (sound familiar?) trying to stop movie murderer Cinderhella before they die or, worse, miss prom. But the crazed killer let loose on Grizzly Bear students isn't even the ultimate focus of the film. The typical high school drama – girl likes boy, boy is oblivious, no one understands me and life is HARD – takes the backseat to a much more surprising and compelling story including (but not limited to) time travel, body-swapping, aliens, space exploration and video game fighting straight out of Tekken.
While the film premiered at SXSW last year, it is only now receiving a limited release in theaters. If Sony was waiting for Josh Hutcherson's star to rise after the mass success of The Hunger Games, it was the right move: Plenty of Peetaphiles will watch Detention solely to see him play the boy-next-door with a heart of gold who knows all the words to "Fields of Gold" (just check out the Tumblr tracked tag for his character to see fangirls flailing before the movie even premieres). However, because writer-director Joseph Kahn isn't big on one-dimensional stock character clichés, Hutcherson isn't only a lovable, skateboarding slacker, he's also a discriminating music critic named Clapton.
Pegged as a movie about "hipsters" that ultimately insults them, every featured stereotype has its own twist: The ditzy cheerleader obsesses over 90s films and music, the social outcast who's hopelessly in love with Clapton is a socially-active vegetarian, the awkward sex-obsessed best friend idolizes Steven Seagal. Everyone is pretentious to some degree, and everyone is proven to be equally insipid. Kahn adds depth to the story and the cast with updated technology, punchy writing and too many pop culture references to count, but because the dialogue and action move so quickly, you can't appreciate it until the film is over. Besides, we can recognize that no one is that hyper-articulate all the time. If Dawson's Creek taught us anything, it's that all that witty repartee gets a bit exhausting.
For all the comparisons Detention draws to its cult classic teen movie predecessors – Breakfast Club, Heathers, Pretty in Pink, Back to the Future – it simultaneously manages to do something all its own. The self-aware and self-deprecating writing is more than a little gratuitous, but it's different. Detention knows that its entire genre is tapped out, and rather than hide that fact, it openly and ironically mocks it – along with its director (insulting Kahn's previous film Torque), its audience (in patronizing quips from the principal, played by Dane Cook), society ("They give us the day off to grieve, and everyone shows up at the mall") and itself (nobody could critique the film's intentionally annoying characters more than the rest of the cast).
Kahn, a director who's more familiar with music videos than feature films, tweeted that he wanted to "throw a hand grenade into cinema" with this movie, and with the frenetic, fast-paced, downright frantic camera work and story, he almost does. Detention is what happens when the theater attendant hands you a pair of Google glasses instead of cheap plastic 3D lenses. Background information, facts, figures and scores show up along with the action, making it hard to keep track of the actual storyline. The pop-up text has been seen in other recent young adult sci-fi films – Zombieland, Scott Pilgrim – and Detention takes their internal narrative monologue and centers the movie on it, with characters addressing the audience directly.
But maybe this is where film is going. In a world where everyone is constantly tweeting/texting/talking, it's possible that audiences are being conditioned to expect visual assault and sensory overload on-screen, with multiple levels of action and movement that are too quick to fully catch.
This is going to be a polarizing film. Critics are branding it either god-awful or groundbreaking, and there's honestly evidence for both. Detention attempts a lot of things, and it doesn't necessarily achieve them all. But Kahn's fast and loud style isn't quite like anything I've seen before. Considering this film is composed of aspects of others, he deserves credit for making something that still qualifies as original. I'm a member of the target audience (a tweeting teen with too much pop culture knowledge), and I liked it. Kahn might not have thrown quite the hand grenade he wanted, but he's placed a timebomb in the movie industry, and if nothing else, it's ticking.