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13
GOING ON 30
4/10
USA
2004 : Gary WINICK : 97 mins
1987: unhappy
teenager Jenna (Christa B Allen) wishes she could skip the rest of adolescence
and move straight to fully-fledged adulthood. When she wakes up the next
morning, 17 years have duly passed: she's now a 30-year-old (Jennifer
Garner) with a high-flying job on a Manhattan magazine. Inside, however,
she's still 13 - unsurprisingly, complications ensue. This uninspired
re-hash of 80s hit Big did bafflingly well at the US box-office:
sufficiently so, in fact, to make an instant movie-star of Garner - previously
best known via nonsensical spy TV-show Alias. Having shown signs
of comic flair as a putupon girlfriends in 2001's guiltiest pleasure Dude,
Where's My Car?, the appealing, attractive and talented Garner
clearly deserves her overdue, "overnight" success.
But she also
deserves much better material than she gets in this disappointingly lazy
misfire, so sloppily written (by Josh Goldsmith and Cathy Yuspa) and blandly
directed by Winick (Tadpole)
that it feels much longer than its alleged 97 minutes. Equally ill-served
are the miscast Mark Ruffalo (as the adult version of Jenna's childhood
friend Matt), Judy Greer (as her backstabbing "best friend"
Lucy) and Britain's own Andy Serkis - a very long way from Gollum in the
underwritten role of Jenna's flamboyant boss Richard.
While nobody
expects Loachian grit from such fluffy fare, the script could surely have
keep one foot in some kind of recognisable reality: the film's idea of
the New York publishing scene is laughable at best, and the mechanism
by which Jenna wishes herself forward (and, ultimately, back) in time
is conveniently mysterious "fairy dust." The writers haven't
quite thought the consequences of Jenna's actions through properly - the
dodgy issue of her sexuality is left hazy, and the laborious "happy-ending"
finale is more than a little rough on the hapless Matt, not to mention
his fiancee Arlene (Marcia DeBonis). It's difficult to work out just who
13 Going on 30 is aimed at: undemanding teenagers, or older viewers
pondering the roads not taken. But anyone who can actually remember the
mid-80s will be bemused by the soundtrack's selection of pop hits - all
of which hail from 1983.
26th July,
2004
(seen 3rd July : Vue, Leicester : CinemaDays
event press show)
by Neil
Young
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