Detention Review

  Proudly assaulting the audience’s senses and intellect “Detention” offers the same inane style of a Michael Bay film, and yet, even his films are more cohesive than a single frame of “Detention.” Written and directed by music-video director Joseph Kahn, he offers little to no narrative or any care for characters that it ultimately becomes pointless to care about anything and leaves one to anticipate for the end credits to come. If anything, Kahn definitely brings a unique freshness to the Scream-esque genre with dialogue composed of mostly 90’s references and a visual style that at times, is quite invigorating and something to latch onto this train wreck of a film. However, his efforts proves to be fruitless as this edgy meta pop-cultured inspired mess elongates further and further to heights of ridiculousness and randomness, it becomes hard to be engaged and just feel a sense of numbness to anything the film throws at you. A combination of horror movies with high school savvy comedy with a quirky attitude thrown in, Detention comes off being more bloated and indulgent than anything to come out so far this year.



  Right from the beginning, a young, promiscuous girl tells you right up front (Yes. That’s you) about “how to avoid being a reject in high school” and lays it all out in screen texts and images while hollering at her parents. Only to end up being murdered by a serial killer known as “Cinderhella.” Then we’re quickly introduced to the cynical yet lonely outcast Riley (Shanely Caswell) the skateboarding hipster Clapton (Josh Hutcherson) the ditsy cheerleader friend of Riley, Ione (Spencer Locke) a nerd (Aaron David Johnson) and a whole slew of walking cliches who have become the next targets of this serial killer’s reign on a Saturday afternoon detention. Yet, that’s just the first twenty minutes. Throughout, the film is jam-packed with pop culture references dating back to late 80’s to early 90’s era to teen movies and a heaping wad of meta humor more excessive than any of the Scream films. Yet, what Kahn thinks he may be doing is fresh, invigorating and worthwhile, only adds up to being a cringe-induced migraine headache of a bloated narrative without any cohesiveness to be found, characters so thinly written without any dimensions to be had except with the archetypes they play of high school movies and overall; a achingly  pointless endeavor of edgy humor passed off as “new” and “original” when it’s just incomprehensible to take in. 


                                        

  Despite the inane script, Kahn does pull off some freshly executed visual/editing style with his camera as he does pump some original stylistic decisions as in certain scenes, the editing makes it more tolerable and to convey the sense of the hyperactive lifestyle of a teenager to a marvelous montage sequence involving the passing of school years in the detention room. The hyperactive energy is interwoven around Kahn and Mark Palermo’s dialogue, which is composed of anything within range of nostalgic memorabilia that might indicate that Kahn resents this generation of 140 Twitter character texting degenerates that he attempts to make all his characters cold, miserable wrecks. Almost everyone is unlikeable. The bitterness that comes off these characters almost seeps through the screen as one can’t help but feel trapped in a room full of despicable ingrates. Despite the loner Riley being a hopeless sympathetic character, nothing inhabiting these empty vessels resemble anything remotely related to a character. They’re all walking dictionaries for your pop-culture obsessed pleasure. Unfortunately, those pages are void of any characters or any depth to be had with them.



  The cardinal sin this movie commits is that it torpedoes itself in its own uniqueness and ballsy narrative. Kahn desperately wants to break out of the normal conventions of narrative storytelling and wants to create something different yet enjoyable to be viewed upon. Yet, what he doesn’t realize is, without a narrative or any thread of cohesiveness to be had within this world, there’s no point to even be watched. The film is a jumbled mess. For the whole duration, it takes different turns of genre by introducing science fiction and teen drama all mixed in with an ambiguous horror element that by the end, it looses focus and direction to where the script might as well pull out any random genre element just because it can. For any consolation for those who see it, the first twenty minutes or so are the only story to be had with, after that, it’s “No Man’s Land.”



                                           

  Being fully self-indulgent in its own craft, it tries to be as edgy and clever with all the visual gags and texts that appear on image, as if using referential humor were as easy as breaking the fourth wall several times just to slide in a smart-alecky comment or a “wink-wink” nod to the audience. Attempting a similar style that of 2010’s“Scott Pilgrim,” yet, does it with so much staleness and dry-crass jokes that it doesn’t justify their attempts and comes off as trying too hard. Imagine the film having an “autopilot” button but pushed to a level of randomness with just random 90s references wrapped around a dull narrative polished as a tongue-and-cheek attitude, only to come off as ostensibly assaulting the viewer’s time and intelligence. 



  This is begging for the “cult hit” status that horrifyingly, might have its wish come true. It’s concealed by a fake guise of savvy dialogue and an eccentric tone that under the veil, it's an infectious attempt at originality, boasting a narrative without any respect for the convention of storytelling in general and is a blatant wastage of a person’s time. Every frame is composed with the intention of entertaining the mind while delightfully mocking you in the realization that it has gleefully wasted ninety-minutes of precious time. Truly, this is the absolute worst of the year that it can proudly proclaim the mantle of being “horrendously loathsome.” It ultimately becomes so scathingly exhaustive to decipher this barren-ridden wasteland of forgotten ideas, that one is praying for the closing credits to come to one’s rescue. Dismally, they couldn’t come soon enough. 



                                                         Rating: F by Amritpal Rai