Parents' Guide to Supercool

Crossing lovable, hapless nerds with fantasy elements in the pursuit of dream girls, this raunchy teen comedy feels transplanted from the early 1980s and suffers from creaky, clueless jokes. While it may resemble American Pie, Superbad, and Booksmart on the surface, its true blueprint comes from oldies like Zapped! and Weird Science, movies in which the characters were just as interested in sex and partying as they were in romance. And while the journey of Supercool ends in the right place -- the hero realizes that his dream girl is an actual person -- the route it takes to get there is threadbare and embarrassing. (What's more, the fantasy element -- the 11:11 wish -- fails to make much sense and never really works.)

The movie gets points for the strong friendship between Neil and Gilbert, buddies who have no reservations about their love for each other. But minor characters border on offensive stereotypes; one, a man of Indian descent who runs a convenience store, sparks dialogue about whether the situation is "racist," but the filmmakers still don't seem to understand the nuance. Truthfully, even though it's hard to hate the two protagonists, the movie simply falters in the laughs department, falling back on dumb jokes about sex and drugs, as well as jabs at cultural differences. The films that become classics of this genre find the humanity in the characters' situations. Supercool is merely a carbon copy of the actual cool stuff that came before.