:star: :star: :star:
A high school senior has to re-live losing his virginity over and over again until he gets it right.
In “Groundhog Day”, Bill Murray’s Phil Connors relives the same day over and over again. Naturally, he can’t figure out why he is stuck in a time loop that only he is aware of but as the story unfolds, he realizes, from the people around him, just how much of an ass he really is and gradually, he begins to change his ways, for the better. This is what ends his ‘curse’ and he becomes a better person because of it. In “Premature”, we have the same plot in Rob (John Karna), a young high school kid, who finds himself repeating the same day over and over.
The movie begins with him having a wet dream and then waking up in his bed with soiled underwear. Come to find out that Rob can’t stay erect for very long and has a slight case of premature ejaculation and that is the trigger for him repeating the same day recurrently. In typical fashion, the first time the day repeats itself, Rob thinks he’s dreaming or suffering from tremendous déja vu but as each day comes and goes, he learns to have fun, knowing that anything he does or says, will be wiped clean when the day starts over.
Rob is best friends with Gabrielle (Katie Findlay) and Stanley (Craig Roberts) and tutors the school hottie Angela (Carlson Young) after school. One day he goes over to her house to study with her and she tells him that she’s really into him and starts kissing and touching him when suddenly BANG! The day starts over. After a while, he becomes exasperated with every day as he can’t seem to figure out what he needs to do in order to have it all stop but of course, we know that he’s meant to be with Gabrielle, the girl he’s been best friends with since he was a kid.
“Premature” is genuinely entertaining with some intensely hilarious scenes. Alan Tudyk is hysterical as a school recruiter for Rob’s parents’ alma mater and what I really liked about the movie, is that it focused on the regular kids, not the jocks, the geeks, the popular kids or the mean girls, but the seemingly normal, everyday kids. I grew up in Ireland where we didn’t have high school, our schooling system was very different so from an early age, I had a great love and affinity for high school movies from the 1980s, movies like “High School U.S.A.”, “Porky’s”, “Up the Creek” and “Weird Science”.
“Premature” doesn’t set out to recreate the high school genre, it simply adds a twist that we’re all familiar with, thanks to the likes of the aforementioned “Groundhog Day” and “Edge of Tomorrow”. The characters throughout are all believable and very likable and even some of the bullies that we briefly encounter, have a soft side we don’t see too often. While some of the scenarios are at times, far-fetched, it’s what you’d come to expect from a movie where the lead character is repeating the same day over and over all because he can’t keep an erection!
In theaters July 2nd
