Blockers (2018)

Blockers (2018)

3/10

Starring

Leslie Mann

John Cena

Directed by Kay Cannon

Nothing in this world can prepare you for the ride and script packaged for you in this movie.

Before watching, I decided to get the audience’s view on the movie. When a movie stars Leslie Mann and John Cena—with Cena doing a butt chug—has a low audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but the critics like it, I started to suspect that something in this movie doesn’t add up. For movies like this, the reverse is usually the case, where the audience likes it for star power, and the critics can’t be easily swayed by the presence of any star. But it seems the critics loved the stars, while the audience couldn’t be easily swayed by bad writing and strange sexual plot lines.

Watching it myself, I can safely say that the movie is a bust. What a distasteful way to depict parents as overprotective people who lack the basic ability to exhibit self-control and couldn’t care less about the effects of invading their children’s privacy.

When the movie starts by portraying the parents as weird and silly, each having some personal issues from the past that they need to address (mostly sex-related), I could smell disaster ahead. The plot introduces our victims, who happen to be the daughters of the overprotective parents—Julie, Kayla, and Sam—whose crime was planning to lose their virginity on prom night. They made a pact to make the night memorable by hinting to their dates what they planned to do.

Each parent starts planning how to make sure the girls have a good time, with one parent (Sam’s) organizing a limo for the event, as he suspects his daughter is a closeted gay and has nothing to worry about with her and boys.

When their daughters are out with their prom dates, they start texting each other, reminding themselves of their pact. Unfortunately, one of the daughters left her laptop on, synced with her phone’s chat. As the chat continues with the girls, the laptop keeps beeping, and the parents decide to take a look. Through some stupid detective-style decryption, they discover what their children’s emoji texts are saying—reminding themselves of the pact. The parents take it upon themselves to make sure none of their children have sex that night and start an elaborate journey, following their kids from party to party to cock-block them.

The movie is one of those where someone must take one for the team to go see it and tell the others to run. Well, I’ve taken one for you, my fellow readers. Save your money.