High school comedies come and go, but how many of them do you know
that include international assassins? Surely it's material the late great John
Hughes never tackled, but if he did it would probably be more convincing than Barely Lethal, a retro comedy
that aims to be Clueless meets Kick-Ass but ends up missing the target by
a wide margin.
Hailee Steinfeld is 16-year-old Megan
Walsh, the top teenaged killer at a secret academy training young orphans to be
assassins. Little girls playing with heavy weaponry and hand grenades is just
one reason the film was initially slapped with an R-rating before the MPAA had
a change of heart; the other reasons will come later when Megan decides she
wants to have a normal life. While on the hunt for cocky terrorist Victoria
Knox (Jessica Alba), Megan sees her chance to escape and fakes her own death.
All she wants to do is go to high school like a regular girl because Mean Girls
and Bring It On make it look like so much fun, but it turns out to be just as
deadly as being an assassin.
With Fanboys director Kyle Newman at the helm, this
was never going to be a sobering drama like Hanna, which deals tangentially
with similar subject matter. Instead the tone is firmly tongue-in-cheek and
little more than an extended homage to '80s teen comedies, which isn't a
totally bad idea except for the execution. Megan's most interesting aspect, her
violent past, is largely glossed over in favor of typical teen melodrama which
she's ill-equipped to handle. She falls for the hot boy in school, drawing the
ire of the school's clique of mean girls, while her best friend Roger (Thomas
Mann) secretly longs to be with her. There are parties, alcohol, meathead
jocks, and plenty of public embarrassment, all of which are handled in ways
we've seen before in films that didn't involve teen assassins. By the time a
rogue agent (Game of Thrones' Sophie Turner) begins stirring up trouble
we no longer know what makes Megan interesting to begin with. 
These are problems with John D'Arco's
uneven screenplay which is so focused on honoring past films that it fails to
take advantage of a premise with tremendous comedic potential. Samuel L.
Jackson growls as Megan's tough-as-nails handler, Hardman, but his talent for
exactly this kind of role goes to waste. The best thing about it is
Steinfeld, who has done solid work in bad films before. She gets Megan's social
naiveté and desire for acceptance. She's exactly the kind of girl we cheer for
in all of those old Hughes films. We want her to remain herself, become popular
anyway, and get the guy she deserves to be with. If Barely Lethal were just another high school comedy
it would be perfectly passable, but in attempting to be more it shoots nothing
but blanks.
Rating: 2.5 out of 5
