Tragedy stalks a wrestling family

 When I was a kid, I'd occasionally watch professional wrestling. But it never held my interest for long because it was a) grotesque b) staged and c) melodramatic. 

  Also, my mother would sometimes insist on a channel change. 

  "Why is that 'junk' blaring on the TV? Read a book.”

  The Iron Claw, a movie set in the world of professional wrestling, takes place in the 1970s and 1980s, long after I had even a minimal interest in pro wrestling. Thankfully director Sean Durkin (Marcy May Marlene) isn't only preaching to the pro-wrestling choir. 

  Durkins brings plenty of indie spirit to the story of the Von Erich family, a fabled bunch of professional wrestlers. He gives the movie focus by concentrating on the father/son relationship between Kevin Von Erich (an almost unrecognizable Zac Efron) and his tyrannical father (Holt McCallany).

    Kevin's three brothers (Harris Dickinson, Jeremy Allen White, and Stanley Simons) play important roles in creating the pressured environment in which these young men struggle toward maturity.

    All of the brothers wrestle. Even Simons's Mike, who prefers music and plays in a band, picks up the wrestling shield when others have fallen.

    Efron excels as Kevin, who for a time, is passed over in the family's quest to capture a championship belt. Nothing drives McCallany's Fritz, who wrestled during the 1960s, more than being top dog.  Fritz loves his kids but he has a touch of the Great Santini in him. He pushes, goads, and insists that the brothers meet his standards of toughness.

    The brothers mostly defer to Dad's judgments, and the relationships between the siblings are depicted as competitive yet caring.

    Kevin broods about being passed over in favor his brothers before getting his shot at the big time, but he doesn't undermine them. Although these young men have been taught to regard themselves as members of a family business, we get to know each of them as individuals.

   Dickinson's Davis seems like the only brother who's having fun in the ring. He’s the guy for whom things come easily. Kevin sweats; Davis glides.

  White's Kerry is infected by intensity, a counterpoint to Mike’s conflicted nature.

   As he tells the story of the Von Erich tribe, Durkin finds dark currents. The family believes it has been cursed. The oldest Von Erich brother died when he was a child. Since then, the brothers have been looking over their shoulders for the shadow of the reaper.

       Questions of danger loom because of injuries, accidents, and a father's unremitting mind-set, which he justifies as necessary if his sons are to achieve the goal he imposes on them. He even ranks his sons, although he acknowledges that the rankings can change according to performance.

   Softer moments occur when Kevin falls for the woman (Lily James) who will become his wife, the first glimmer that some of life's rewards might not require climbing into the ring or tossing someone out of it.

    If you're looking for a movie full of sports triumphs, The Iron Claw may disappoint. You'll more likely remember the movie as the tragic story of a family that found heartbreak in its single-minded pursuit of ring renown. 

   If you research the Von Erichs, you'll learn that Durkin omitted mention of Chris, a sixth son. Maybe purists will care. I wondered about it, but moved on.

   I don't want to oversell The Iron Claw, but there's good reason to acknowledge its strengths, including Efron's performance.  He gives the movie its wounded soul. 

   Kevin may not be the best of the Von Erich wrestlers, but he's sincere and eventually he learns that living under dictatorial rule isn't satisfying -- even if the dictator happens to be your father.

 

A dramatized look at Ted Bundy

Zac Efron makes a convincing Bundy, but it's not always easy to figure out what director Joe Berlinger has in mind.

I can't say that I recommend Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile -- a dramatized version of the murderous years of serial killer Ted Bundy's life. To be honest: I'm still grappling with my own reaction to this Netflix movie.

As someone who worked on a Denver newspaper's city desk back when Bundy was being held in an Aspen jail (he escaped), I'm not sure that I know much more about Bundy than I did before I saw Extremely Wicked. Directed by Joe Berlinger, who also created the Netflix series, Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, the movie builds around Zac Efron's terrific performance as the charming, intelligent killer.

On the surface, Bundy was a young law student, who, as the judge at his trial stated, could have led an admirable life but who went a different way. Talk about understatement.

At the same time as I say that I can't recommend Extremely Wicked, I have to admit that I watched it with interest, mostly because Berlinger -- an Oscar winner for his documentary Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory -- makes two interesting choices: First, he doesn't show us Bundy committing his most brutal crimes and second he allows Efron to stay within a range of normality that's challenged by everything we already know about Bundy.

When Bundy gently caresses the neck of girlfriend Liz Kendall (Lily Collins), we fear for her, even though she seems to be part of the "ordinary" existence that Bundy tries to maintain. This may make it sound as if Berlinger, who based the story on Kendall's book, The Phantom Prince; My Life With Ted Bundy, suggests that Bundy had a split personality. He doesn't.

If the movie has a point: It's this: This apparently normal guy -- good-looking and with plausible political aspirations -- is exactly the same fellow who mercilessly kills young women.

Efron gives a compelling performance but Berlinger doesn't dig deeply enough into Liz's love for Ted. As a single mom, she trusted Bundy with her young daughter. She couldn't deny her feelings for him. As Bundy moves through his various legal tribulations, Liz drinks too much. She struggles to fend off the truth about the man she once intended to marry. Perhaps Liz alone should have been the movie's main concern.

Like many true crime movies, Extremely wicked ends up in a courtroom. There, Bundy proves adept at defending himself. John Malkovich portrays the judge who presides over Bundy's trial, but Malkovich's innate eloquence can’t quite accommodate the homespun remarks of a judge who speaks the words that give the movie its lengthy title.

At 110 minutes, the movie feels long because, in the end, it has only one point to make: Bundy, whose ease and charm fooled many women into becoming victims, may have been able to fool himself, as well.

So don't ask me if you should see this movie. The answer depends on whether you want to see a sometimes intriguing movie that may leave you unsure about its merits. All I'll say is that Efron seldom has been better and that fascination with a 1970s story that once gripped the nation hasn't entirely faded.

Not the greatest movie musical

The Greatest Showman feels like a generic version of a big-screen musical.

A musical about P.T. Barnum -- a man whose name has become synonymous with all-American hucksterism -- might be a welcome addition to the current moment of hyperbole and rant. But The Greatest Showman, which stars Hugh Jackman as Barnum, isn't that movie.

Torn between mild criticism of Barnum's ability to sell anything and a view of Barnum as a champion of those who are different (he invented the circus sideshow), The Great Showman lands a middling blow.

Director Michael Gracey, an Australian who thus far has done lots of work in commercials, turns out a generic musical that features lots of bubbly music from a quartet of songwriters that include two lyricists from La La Land (Benj Pasik and Justin Paul). I never thought the music in La La Land reached knock-out levels; the same goes for the music in The Greatest Showman, which feels like a musical that has been engineered to hit all the appropriate notes -- from buoyancy to lyricism to foot-stomping rigor.

But the calculation is impossible to ignore as we learn the story of Barnum, a man from the wrong side of the tracks who married upward. Michelle Williams portrays Charity Barnum, a character who doesn't allow her affluent upbringing to stand in the way of her unwavering support for Barnum, a lower-class striver who wants to prove that he can give Charity the kind of life her snooty family regards as her birthright.

As the story develops, Barnum opens a circus/museum in New York City. He acquires a variety of acts -- from the diminutive Tom Thumb (Sam Humphrey) to a bearded lady (Keala Settle) with a robust singing voice.

The movie also shows how Barnum develops a relationship with the more artistically oriented Phillip Carlyle (Zac Efron). Barnum persuades Carlyle to join his circus as an investor and partner. Carlyle quickly falls for a trapeze artist named Anne (Zendaya), but class strictures and the racial prejudice of his family limit Carlyle's willingness to acknowledge his feelings publicly.

Once he establishes himself as a circus impresario, Barnum decides that he needs to class-up his act: he brings Swedish songstress Jenny Lind (Rebecca Ferguson) (a.k.a., the Swedish Nightingale) to the states for a series of concerts that make a ton of money.

Tempted by an opportunity to elevate his status, Barnum turns his back on the unusual people who helped him become rich. He devotes all his time to Lind, wrecks his marriage and eventually sees his fortunes reduced to nothing.

Will he come back? Does the circus have three rings?

Of course, Barnum eventually transcends his vanity and again becomes a champion for the purity of family love and for those society sees as "different," all of which plays like the hooey that Barnum tried to sell to the rude and scoffing multitudes of his day.

Jackman knows how to occupy the center of a musical and does so with verve, style and unflagging command. Efron holds his own as a sidekick. Williams and Ferguson, along with Zendaya, give the movie some welcome female presence.

The retro 1800s production design keeps pace with the performances, but a ton of effort and expense can't elevate The Greatest Showman to the upper levels of the movie musical pantheon. It's gaudy, overproduced and, for the most part, more committed to spectacle and shine than anything of lasting worth.

Few laughs wash ashore in 'Baywatch'

Dwayne Johnson and Zac Efron are lifeguards in a movie that never convinces that it has any reason to exist.

Why anyone wanted to turn a beach-boob-and-muscle TV series into a movie is beyond me. But that didn't stop director Seth Gordon (Horrible Bosses and Identity Thief) from taking on the challenge of creating a big-screen version of Baywatch.

In its new version, the always buffed Dwayne Johnson teams with an equally buffed Zac Efron to create a movie that tries to parody something that already looked like parody, a lame bit of 1990s TV that developed a following among those who liked pecs, peek-a-boo bathing suits and unblemished skin.

Mixing hard bodies with a soft-headed mystery involving drugs and real estate, Baywatch is neither funny nor tense enough to drive the movie to whatever destination it may have been trying to reach.

Despite a few attempts at self-referential hipness (cameos from David Hasselhoff and Pamela Anderson among them), the movie's humor mostly dips as low as the bikinis the Baywatch women wear.

Johnson's Mitch runs the Baywatch lifeguard squad like a military unit; he insists that the lifeguards devote themselves to protecting a stretch of Florida beach as if it were Fort Knox.

As part of a PR ploy, Mitch is forced to hire a disgraced Olympic medalist (Efron) who begins the movie as a kind of selfish outlier but (here's a surprise) eventually accepts the group ethos.

To further fulfill the demands of contemporary comedy, the movie adds the obligatory nerdy guy to its muscular mix. Jon Bass plays Ronnie, a guy who's accepted as a lifeguard trainee because he has "heart." The movie's first big joke involves Ronnie, an erection and a beach chair with slats. It's not the last penis joke, either.

Despite his bean-bag physique, Ronnie seems to catch the eye of a bombshell, run-in-slow-mo lifeguard played by Kelly Rohrbach.

Priyanka Chopra who plays Victoria, the villain of the piece, a woman with murderous plans to acquire every bit of real estate in the bay area.

A local cop (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) wonders why a group of lifeguards are getting themselves involved in crime. You may share his consternation, but then it's probably not fair to expect a Baywatch movie to make much sense.

About three-quarters of the way through, the script finds a way to sideline Johnson and allow Efron to dominate the proceedings, a major mistake.

Forget the movie's amped-up ocean rescues: Someone was needed to rescue a screenplay that should have been beached.

If you're looking for a movie that has some laughs and effectively deals with the idiocy of bygone TV shows, try Mindhorn, a British comedy available on Netflix. It actually manages to find some laughs in telling the story of a washed-up TV hero who's asked to help solve a real-life murder

When the neighbors are frat boys

A gross-out comedy that parties hard.

The new comedy Neighbors failed to persuade me that Seth Rogen's inner schlubiness deserves to occupy a movie's center ring, a spot he's now sharing with Zac Efron and Rose Byrne.

Neighbors -- which contrasts a dissolute-looking Rogen with a super-trim Zac Efron -- may create an early summer stir at the box office.

Why? The movie bristles with the kind of vulgar energies that mark most of today's successful comedies. Neighbors is full of opportunities for gross-out jokes -- and doesn't pass on many of them.

The high-concept gist: A party-hardy fraternity moves next door to a young couple that's adjusting to taking care of their first child, a baby daughter.

At first, the new parents (Rogen and Rose Byrne) try to cozy up to their raucous neighbors, who are being led by Efron's Teddy, the frat's chief party boy.

Husband and wife share in the drug-fueled debauchery, awkwardly trying to present themselves as peers -- albeit peers with responsibilities.

When that tactic fails to produce the desired quiet, Rogen and Byrne declare war on the rowdy neighbors, employing subterfuge and other means to close the frat house.

The purported battle between adults and hormonally active young men is a bit of sham. Neighbors seems like the kind of comedy that would become a DVD staple at Delta Psi Beta, the movie's fictional fraternity.

Director Nicholas Stoller (Forgetting Sarah Marshall and The Five-Year Engagement) happily embraces the movie's premise, which allows for more gags than story.

To me, Rogen's performance seems barely distinguishable from everything else he's done. Byrne -- whose Australian accent seems to come and go -- displays no qualms about leaping into the profane fray. Efron -- often sans shirt -- tries to mix comedy and hunk appeal as the movie's Peter Pan figure, another guy who refuses to grow up.

A subplot pits Efron's character against one of his fraternity brothers (Dave Franco), a young man who begins to understand that the fraternity's concerns (who invented the game of beer pong, for example) aren't exactly on a par with working to limit the effects of climate change.

We get it: A few years ago, Rogen's character would have been Efron's character: A few years from now Efron's character might be Rogen's character. Profound, no?

You'll find jokes about breast pumps and dildos. A sight gag involving airbags made me laugh.

Personally, I wouldn't want to live next door to any character in a movie that parades its crude humor across the screen while making what feel like random attempts to play grown-up.

Oh well, I suppose something is accomplished here: Neighbors makes the strongest case for restrictive zoning ever put on film.

Sex, sweat and lots of humidity

Overwrought Paperboy goes way south

Director Lee Daniels's new movie The Paperboy, an adaptation of a 1995 Peter Dexter novel, sweats its way through a densely packed and lurid story that can seem both pungent and preposterous -= not to mention a trifle repellent.

What did Daniels have in mind? A wallow in southern-fried sleaze? A story about misapplied justice? A display of weird sexual tension? An opportunity for Zac Efron to spend time lolling about in his underwear?

Daniels, who co-wrote the screenplay with Dexter, dips into a vat full of Southern Gothic ingredients and scoops them onto the screen without straining them through the filter of a carefully developed narrative. What you get are large, often indigestible hunks of movie. The Paperboy is all gristle.

Daniels laces the humid Florida air with several narrative threads. A crusading journalist (Matthew McConaughey) tries to free a convict (John Cusack) who may have been wrongly convicted of murdering a sadistic sheriff. A slatternly woman (Nicole Kidman) corresponds with the convict, believing she has found a soul mate. The journalist's younger brother (Efron) falls for Kidman's Charlotte Bless, seeing himself as her protector.

The actors in The Paperboy are drenched in so much humidity that the movie can feel as it's taking place in a swamp. Of course, some of it does take place in swampy Florida backwaters. The time: 1969.

McConaughey plays Ward Jansen, a Miami reporter who travels to a small Florida town accompanied by a defiant black writing partner (David Oyelowo).

Efron's Jack Jansen, Ward's brother, lives with his father (Scott Glenn) and stepmother (Nealla Gordon). Jack takes advice from the family maid (Macy Gray), a woman who seems to have supplied him with the only form of maternal love he has known. Add a few Oedipal overtones, stir gently and you've got the relationships between Jack and Gray's character.

Gray's Anita Chester narrates the film, but her guidance doesn't help Daniels to keep the narrative from confusion, particularly in the early going when the movie's who's-who list has yet to sort itself out.

Kidman, who embraces her character's slutty vivaciousness, certainly doesn't need to prove her courage, but The Paperboy reminds us that she's up for almost anything. Here, she shares a scene with Cusack (a jailhouse visit) in which both characters engage in some kind of psychic sexual interchange that leaves them damp. The two journalists and Jack, who are also present, look on with amazement. So, probably, will you.

In another scene, Kidman's character urinates on Efron's Jack, apparently to relieve a severe allergic reaction to a jellyfish sting.

For Cusack, The Paperboy marks a stretch; maybe he has a future playing crude men with IQs that seem to dip below the scorching Florida temperatures. He's convincingly raw and frightening.

Daniels always seems to be pushing too hard, and, as he showed in Precious, he often carries things too far. Let's just say that there have been kinder views of McConaughey than the one that shows his naked posterior in a motel room.

But wait: There's more. When Ward and Jack visit a swamp-dwelling miscreant in search of evidence that might help liberate Cusack's character, we watch as the man slices open an alligator and lets its innards fall to the dirt. Oh well, at least Daniels didn't ask anyone to eat the slimy entrails.

If you're looking for something something febrile, the finale of The Paperboy won't disappoint. The same goes for much of the movie's beginning and its middle.

The actors are all game and committed, but Daniels too often leaves them wallowing in this sty of a story. Watching The Paperboy can be like watching someone drown in a bucket of sweat.

Two romances: one with real signs of life Reviews of The Lucky One, Think Like A Man

Zac Efron and in another adaptation of a Nicholas Sparks novel. Just what we've been waiting for.

Nicholas Sparks seems to write novels that automatically turn themselves into movies; it's almost as if the romantic vapors of Sparks's prose waft off the page and then seep their way into the nation's multiplexes.

The Lucky One, the latest Sparks novel to reach the screen, displays most of the hallmarks of Sparks's re-heated romanticism in a story that focuses on an apparently accidental event that brings two people together.

These Sparks-inspired movies -- and The Lucky One is no exception -- are the dramatic equivalent of elevator music, melding pretty pictures with the kind of soulless drama that allows audiences to guess each line of dialog before a character even recites it. Some people like these carefully packaged, easy-on-the-eyes love stories, which also seem to require the presence of an actor with cred in the hunk department. I'm not a fan.

In this case, Zac Efron plays Logan, a combat-weary Marine who returns from Iraq with a case of post-trauamatic jitters. After a little research, Logan and his faithful German shepherd walk (yes, I said walk) from Colorado to Louisiana to look for a woman (Taylor Schilling) in photograph he found on a bombed-out Iraqi battlefield. He finds her running a small business that boards and grooms dogs.

Logan's about to explain about the snapshot, but Schilling's Beth is focused on something else, and he can't bring himself to tell the story anyway. Instead, he takes a job at the kennel, where he quickly endears himself to the woman's young son (Reily Thomas Stewart) and to her grandmother (Blythe Danner).

Beth is slower to warm to Logan, but we know that she'll eventually fall for him. We also know that there will be obstacles, the principal one arriving in the person of Beth's bullying ex-husband (Jay R. Ferguson), who also happens to be the local sheriff.

And then there's Logan's looming secret about the photograph, which leads to a scene that's supposed to threaten to knock the characters off their pre-determined tracks. We know better: No one in movie such as this gets knocked off his or her tracks.

As the mysterious stranger, Efron gives a minimalist performance, which is a kind way of saying he makes an actor like Channing Tatum, who also has appeared in an adaptation of a novel by Sparks, look expressive. Schilling brings more life to her role, but this is the kind of movie in which acting comes awfully close to posing. Maybe that makes sense. The characters in The Lucky One don't really have relationships; they romp through montages.

Director Scott Hicks, who hasn't exactly been breaking new ground since he came to international notice in 1996 with the much-accalimed Shine, opts to follow the Sparks formula, which means that even Louisiana's fetid, swampy waters emit a lustrous, romantic glow.

Lively, attractive cast brings life to formulaic Think Like a Man

If you're looking for a livelier romantic fantasy than The Lucky One, you may want to try the big-screen adaptation of Steve Harvey's best-selling Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man.

Harvey's book of strategic advice for women isn't exactly a natural source for big-screen entertainment, so don't expect miracles.

Worse yet, the movie seems designed to sell even more copies of Act Like a Lady by making constant references to it or having characters read it while prominently displaying the cover. There's even an appearance by Harvey himself.

One more caveat: Think Like a Man is little more than a glorified sitcom, but it's made tolerable by an attractive cast that manages to add humanity to what amounts to a fantasy set in the world of bright, mostly successful black professionals with a few white folks around the movie's fringes.

I don't know about Harvey's book, but the movie seems to take aim at a thirty-something audience that believes in a post-racial world that we'd all like to believe has arrived -- even if we're not entirely sure it has.

A lavishly appealing cast includes: Meagan Good as Maya, a woman who decides to invoke Harvey's 90-day rule: No sex with a new suitor until three months have passed; Taraji P. Henson as Lauren, a CEO who's skeptical about the Harvey approach, and Regina Hall as a single mom who tries to woo a mama's boy (Terrence J) away from his domineering mother.

The guys, who convene at a small gym for basketball and chat, include Romany Malco, as a budding composer and the movie's resident "play-ah," and Kevin Hart, as the movie's source of comic relief. Jerry Ferrra, familiar from HBO's Entourage where he played the often hapless Turtle, fares better here as an indecisive young man who has the good fortune to be living with Kristen (Gabrielle Union). Fans of this kind of movie will be treated to a self-referential cameo from a slightly older veteran of similar fare, Morris Chesetnut.

I laughed a few times and found the general vibe to be pleasant enough in a movie that at least isn't out to convince us that it's anything more than date-night fluff.

Russell Crowe keeps the presses rolling

The new thriller "State of Play" should make newspaper folks happy -- not because it's a great movie, but because it's packed with dialog that sings the praises of old-school journalism as opposed to blogging and other forms of Internet flotsam.

For me, the most moving part of the movie arrives during the end credits. We watch as the presses roll and an edition of the fictional Washington Globe makes its way toward the streets. Those of us who've spent much of our lives working for papers may not be able to view those credits without feeling a trifle obsolete. With more and more papers vanishing from the publishing landscape, the mighty roar of the presses threatens to go silent -- or at least be reduced to a sporadic growl.

OK, now that I've got that out of my system, a look at "State of Play," a tolerable thriller that stars Russell Crowe as an appropriately disheveled reporter for The Washington Globe. After a gripping opening involving a couple of murders, Crowe's Cal McAffrey finds himself in the middle of a story that involves his old college roommate (Ben Affleck), now a Congressman. Affleck's Rep. Collins has been working to expose a company called PointCorp, which is busy accumulating too much power. Cal's involvement in his new story is complicated by his friendship with the Congressman. It also doesn't help that he once slept with the Congressman's wife (Robin Wright Penn).

For all its topical journalistic references -- the Globe just has been bought by a media conglomerate that can't take its eye off the bottom line -- "State of Play" winds up having less to do with the fate of newspapers than with a web of conspiracy that has engulfed Washington. By now, the ingredients have become movie staples: corporate greed, an unchecked lust for power, sexual hijinx and the kind of personal rot that makes people want to run for cover -- or at least for the next cover-up. I kept wishing "State of Play" would reveal something new. I didn't want it to be satisfied with jaded beliefs that have become de rigueur. In "State of Play," cynicism feels like yesterday's news.

Say this, though: Crowe looks almost as bad as any journalist I've worked with. Hey, I said "almost." Rumpled, pudgy and sporting unfashionably long hair, Crowe's Cal refers to the whiskey he drinks as "Irish wine." He lives alone, a newspaper monk who's known to every cop in the city. Fortunately, Crowe adds touches of compassion to the role of a hard-boiled reporter who's annoyed that his editor (Helen Mirren) has teamed him with one of the paper's Internet reporters (Rachel McAdams). Cal regards McAdams' Della Frye as little more than a gossip monger. Of course, they develop a bond, and, no, it's not romantic.

As befits a good thriller, a complicated plot is dotted with small, tasty roles. Jason Batemen is slick and sleazy as a PR man who knows where bodies are buried, and Jeff Daniels proves convincing as the House majority leader. Mirren, who's given a lot of arch one-liners, makes the most of them.

The plot gets a bit too dense at the end, piling on details and twists, and I had the feeling that director Kevin Macdonald ("The Last King of Scotland") was trying for something more meaningful than anything he's been able to achieve. "State of Play," which adapts and Americanizes a highly regarded British TV mini-series, proves entertaining enough, but it's not likely to write any lasting big-screen headlines.

WILL THE MOVIES EVER GRADUATE FROM HIGH SCHOOL?

Watching "17 Again" I felt as if I were turning pages in a book I'd read a thousand times -- and which wasn't all that great to begin with. Familiarity definitely bred a bit of contempt with this teen-oriented comedy, although fairness compels me to rank it as a middle-grade helping of high-school fare.

And, you can breathe at least one sigh of relief. "17 Again" magically turns a grown man (Matthew Perry) into a teen-ager, but spares us the agonies of time travel. Transformed into a kid, Perry's Mike O'Donnell doesn't go back in time; instead he joins his daughter and son in high school, an adult in a kid's body. Of course, Mike's children don't know that the handsome new kid in school is their dad. Wouldn't he look vaguely familiar to them? Evidently not.

The movie grows out of discontent. Mike has been stewing in bitterness for years because he refused a college basketball scholarship so that he could marry and support his high school sweetheart (Leslie Mann). She was pregnant, and Mike did the right thing. Years later, he's mired in regret. He has allowed his life to become one long look backward, a perpetual longing for what might have been.

Seventeen-year-old Mike is played by Zac Efron, a TV heartthrob and "High School Musical" star. If I cared about TV heartthrobs, I'd have gotten around to Efron sooner. He may well turn "17 Again" into a teen/tween success, and if the movie works at all, it's because Efron holds it together.

Of course, you don't believe a minute of "17 Again," but that hardly matters. I saw the movie several three weeks ago, and my precise reaction has been mercifully forgotten. I think I chuckled a few times. Nonetheless, I'll venture a prediction: Look for "17 Again'' to win the weekend at the box office and to enjoy a profitable life on DVD, thus proving that one should never underestimate the power of medium-grade comedy -- not in these distressed times.