'Incoming' feebly gestures toward the power of other movies
Netflix
Coming-of-age movies aren’t popular because each one is so wildly different; the universality is the point, and it would be ridiculous to expect a new generation’s story about high school kids trying to find their place to be the valedictorian of originality.
Yet “Incoming” is evidence not of a worthwhile addition to the canon of wild parties and awkward lessons but merely filmmakers who have seen a bunch of teen movies and wanted to do that too, the same way. Written and directed by Dave and John Chernin (writers on “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” creators of “The Mick”), the new Netflix effort is like an unofficial follow-up on “Good Boys,” or “Project X” if the main characters were the squeaky young security guards, or “Superbad” if you didn’t care about the friendships, or “Booksmart” if more people were dumb, or “American Pie” if nothing was funny.
Wait, hold on: “Incoming” features a huge party during the first week of school, rather than the end of it. So there’s that.
Otherwise, it’s a half-hearted order of the usual: Benj (Mason Thames, a bright spot) has long pined for Bailey (Isabella Ferreira) and is sure he’s about to get his big chance; Eddie (Ramon Reed) lacks courage to stand up to the jerk (Scott MacArthur of the far superior “No Hard Feelings”) dating his mom; Connor (Raphael Alejandro) needs confidence to reject having upperclassmen call him “Fetus”; and Danah (Bardia Seiri) wants to earn the “Koosh” nickname of his older brother Kayvon Koushani (Kayvan Shai) but, like Benj and his older sister Alyssa (Ali Gallo), only feels like an imposition in his sibling’s world.
Arguably the best part of “Incoming” is its little brother energy, focusing on freshmen just starting high school in a sea of older kids who assumedly have it together and of course don’t. There’s also a funny bit that rises above a stale concept when an inappropriate teacher (Bobby Cannavale) uses his presence at the party to teach attendees science in a way that interests them: teaching density in the context of a liquor’s proof, and the misleading name of a gravity bong that is really an issue of pressure.
Mostly, “Incoming” is a bunch of character types given minimal chance to create their own stories. The subplot of Eddie and Connor’s night away from the party blends the forbidden car of “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” and the shenanigans of “Superbad” with the gross-out elements of, yes, the horrible yet enduringly entertaining “Whatever It Takes.” At numerous points characters broadly reference what they’ve seen in other movies (“meet-cute” is mentioned repeatedly) without seeming to have learned anything from them or gained self-awareness about perpetuation of what they’ve seen; “Incoming” is very much not making a statement about how these fake stories shape real behavior.
Granted: Aside from the desperate broadness of its comic set pieces, “Incoming” isn’t quite as awful as something like “I Love You, Beth Cooper,” and a few lines (“You look good, but your insides are gross”) get the point across with memorable sass. Being young and uncertain/stupid can result in a wide variety of nonsense, though, and “Incoming” distills everything it’s consumed, whether drugs or fights or bodily fluids, and projects it back as a reflex rather than a mission. The result is an 81-minute knockoff preaching the importance of being yourself while doing nothing to forge an identity of its own.
C-
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