Blockers Mixes Vulgarity And Sweetness To Remarkably Successful Results

Blockers is many things and one of those things is being the umpteenth piece of proof that movie trailers can be incredibly misleading. The trailers and marketing for Blockers never registered as outright bad to me but they did make the movie look like a run-of-the-mill comedy with nothing all that special to offer. So color me shocked and delighted that Blockers as a film isn't just better than it's trailers, it's a terrific motion picture full stop! This film, which serves as the directorial debut for Kay Cannon, is a riot when it comes to providing a steady stream of memorable laughs, but best of all it's got a touching heart as big as John Cena's muscles.


Impressively, all of this comedy and pathos is juggled in a plot with about six central characters without coming off as overstuffed. This premise involving that half-a-dozen characters centers around High School Seniors Julie (Kathryn Newton), Kayla (Geraldine Viswanathan) and Sam (Gideon Adlon) deciding to lose their individual virginities on Prom Night. This is a plan that their parents, Lisa (Leslie Mann), Mitchell (John Cena) and Hunter (Ike Barinholtz), get wind of and decide to intervene in. These trio of adults are now out to "block" their offspring from fully executing their Prom Night schemes, a plan that gets com

Blockers executes this premise in a manner that's heavy on comedy but also heavy on pleasant surprises in a number of key areas. For one thing, it's fun that the relationship between the trio of lead adult characters consists of them being people that have just drifted apart over the years, there's little familiarity between them once they begin to go an adventure together. This offers up lots of fun opportunities for comedy to emerge via the characters constantly discovering new facets about each other's personalities (like how in Hunter discovers Lisa is a fellow Fast & Furious fan) that the script (credited to five different writers) takes full advantage of to delightful results.

Also pleasantly surprising? How good-natured this movie is. Plenty of vulgar gags pop up, including extensive on-screen vomiting and some on-screen male genitalia, but Blockers is also a totally sweet movie with an affection for its characters that comes through so clearly it might as well be the vocal quality of Courtney B. Vance's voices. Take the relationship between the three lead teenage characters. It's easy to see a typical comedy like this making sure the third act is kicked off by all three of them being separated over some kind of turmoil, but Blockers eschews that traditional narrative path and instead paints a realistic portrait of Julie, Kayla and Sam as true-blue friends who evidently care about each another and stick by one another. That's awesome to see on its own merits and helps sell their friendship as something the audience can be invested in.

That sort of kindliness combined with the deft ability to subvert expectations abounds in Blockers and even extends to the adult characters, most notably Hunter, whose deftly given more depth in his personal anguish as an absentee father without coming off as some kind of MRA wish-fulfillment fantasy. Something else great about the writing of these characters is that none of them are the explicitly playing straight banana to the other characters, everyone here gets a chance to be a vessel for some top-notch comedy. This offers the chance for our lead actors, as well as a number of supporting players, to really shine when the time comes for them to deliver the yuks and this is especially true of anytime John Cena steps up to the plate for a comedic sequence.

In easily his most high-profile live-action feature film role to date, John Cena cements himself as a real comedic actor of note in his depiction of a straight-laced Dad who is so amusingly obliviously awkward in his misunderstanding of how quotation marks or butt chugging work. This is such a different role from the prior comedic cameos Cena has done in the likes of Trainwreck and Sisters and deviating from his past roles pays off big time for him here considering how hilarious he is. The shockingly underappreciated Leslie Mann also proves to be a key element to many of the films funniest moments while Ike Barinholtz graduates to leading man status with impressive success. Meanwhile, the three women playing our lead teenage characters are mightily impressive in both their comedic chops and overall acting ability, especially Gideon Adlon who gets the most emotionally potent storyline of the whole project.

As the director of Blockers, Kay Cannon gets some really strong work out of all these actors in her directorial debut. Aside from a handful of instances of odd camerawork and editing choices, she makes a great inaugural foray into filmmaking here and like with 2018's other early comedy delight Game Night, it's nice to be reminded that thoughtful shot compositions and visual choices can exist in mainstreaming American comedies. Cannon shows a deft ability to get big laughs in Blockers, but I'm even more impressed at how well she handles thoughtful character arcs and moments of pathos here. I left my screening of Blockers chuckling over remembering all kinds of fun gags and also getting all emotional remembering certain major moments of poignancy in its story. Any movie like Blockers that manages to pull that off is a big winner in my book.