Blockers is surprisingly excellent

THE trailer for this new comedy looks so stupid, but don’t pay any attention to it because it is a properly hilarious and clever movie you shouldn’t miss.

HOLD your sphincters tight because there will be lizzing.

For the uninitiated, lizzing is a portmanteau of laughing and whizzing, more inelegantly described as pissing yourself, that sensation of finding something so funny, you lose all bodily control and dignity.

Blockers will have that power over you.

If you saw the trailer for Blockers, ignore it. It doesn’t do it justice, at all. Marketed as a dumb and regressive comedy of three parents trying to stop their teenage daughters from losing their virginity on prom night, it looks exactly like the kind of broad comedy you can skip and save for the ninth hour of a long-haul flight to Europe.

And after a 2017 that included studio stinkers like The House, Baywatch and Snatched, no one would blame you for being wary. Except that Blockers is really good, it’s even great. Along with the surprising Game Night, this could be the redemption big, accessible comedies are looking for.

No, really, it actually is great.

Blockers is a smart, progressive and lizzingly (there’s that word again) hilarious comedy that completely defies expectations.

Yes, it does centre around three parents — played with charm and perfect timing by John Cena, Leslie Mann and Ike Barinholtz — who find out about their daughters’ pact to pop their cherries on prom night, a la American Pie, and spring into action to stop them.

But where it goes is so clever and unpredictable — this is not a case of “fathers, lock up your daughters”. Along with beer contraptions up the butt and cars on fire (standard raucous comedy fare), there’s also so much love and respect on display — love for their kids, respect for their agency. In many ways it’s more subversive than you’d ever imagine on first glance.

The three girls — played by Kathryn Newton, Gideon Adlon (daughter of Pamela Adlon) and Australian Geraldine Viswanathan — are well-rounded characters in their own right, not just tokenistic teens standing in for their parents’ anxieties about their coming-of-age.

Which is surprising considering there are five credited writers on the screenplay — usually not a good sign. But somehow, amid that mess has emerged a properly excellent comedy from first-time director Kay Cannon.

Cannon was best known for her TV writing on 30 Rock before venturing into film as the screenwriter on the Pitch Perfect trilogy and one imagines she did a script polish on set to make it a cohesive whole. Cannon keeps the action moving fast and knows to pull it back when it seems like a gag or set-piece is getting completely ridiculous.

The kids are all right.

The chemistry between the adult leads is sparkling with Mann’s warm energy bouncing off Cena’s up-for-anything attitude and Barinholtz’s more complex guilt over being an absent dad and his unbridled enthusiasm to course correct.

Blockers hits you with a barrage of jokes with a well-up laughs-per-minute ratio, plus physical comedy that doesn’t make you want to cringe, at least not in a bad way. It’s explicit and coarse when it needs to be, and sentimental and emotional when called for. Getting that balance right is much harder than Blockers makes it look.

Do yourself a favour and go see it. It’s a genuinely side-splitting romp.

Rating: 4/5

Blockers is in cinemas from Thursday, March 29.

Share your movies and TV obsessions with @wenleima on Twitter.