Incoming Review – Netflix’s Superbad-esque Comedy Is Super Unfunny | Comedy Movies

THere are a few tried-and-true staples of American high school: yellow buses, homecoming, prom, the social safari that is the school cafeteria. And with every microgeneration, racy teen movies about trying to get by or stay a loser for life. Incoming, a new Netflix teen film from The Mick creators Dave and John Chernin, is the latest attempt to revive the type of outrageous R-rated comedy that Hollywood has been churning out in fits and starts. Like last year’s No Hard Feelings , Joy Ride , or Bottoms , it attempts to channel the unfiltered abandon of American Pie or Superbad , but for kids born after either film premiered. (I’ve realized with horror that this fall’s freshmen, born in 2010, are the first members of Gen Alpha to enter high school.)

Like both of its predecessors, Incoming focuses on a single demographic at the bottom of the food chain: nerdy freshmen who haven’t yet grown up. Benj Nielsen (a winsome Mason Thames) and his friends—Connor (Raphael Alejandro), Eddie (Ramon Reed), and Danah “Koosh” Koushani (Bardia Seiri)—all look like kids in a school full of boorish proto-men played by actors in their late 20s. The plot of this 91-minute film is admirably superficial and austere: Benj, a former theater kid trying to carve out a new image, has a crush on his older sister Alyssa’s (Ali Gallo) best friend, Bailey (Isabella Ferreira), but she’s a sophomore and cool; Koosh must prove himself to his older brother Kayvon (Kayvan Shai), a sociopathic senior who regularly beats him up, by dating someone. Kayvon’s splashy first-weekend-of-school party provides the perfect opportunity for both plans, plus a whole lot of Project X-esque antics.

Though Incoming has a decent handle on the raucous momentum of a high school party and the coarse dialect of freshman boys (Koosh says the party will have “an insane dong-to-pussy ratio”), the film has the consistently distracting sheen of a made-for-streaming film, earning it cheap comparisons to its inspirations. And its sensibility-pushing schtick works considerably less well than some of its ilk, most notably Netflix’s biting Do Revenge or Paramount’s Honor Society , both self-aware throwbacks to blockbuster teen movies that lean into the campy satire side of the canon.

Incoming also aspires to ridiculous caricatures – sophomore Alyssa gets a publicly acknowledged nose job, Benj’s monstrous senior carpool buddy (Thomas Barbusca) drags him into a drug deal, Koosh installs a high-tech surveillance system to spy on potential targets for a “meet-cute” – that come off as more cringe than funny. That’s especially true of Bobby Cannavale as the jolly chemistry teacher so desperate for old glory and validation that he attends and subsequently passes out at the party – a waste of the actor’s palpable charisma and comedic timing on a character used only for commiseratory laughter.

As veterans of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia , the Chernin brothers work in a touch of the long-running sitcom’s beloved debauchery, most obviously by casting Kaitlin Olson as Benj and Alyssa’s mom, a concerned parent turned up to full volume. Incoming works best when that sensibility meets a touch of sweetness — poor Benj’s nerves as he accidentally falls into a K-hole, the band of girls taking selfies while peeing in the yard, drunken girls babbling, or the revelations made in the haze after a party. Unfortunately, those touches are undone by attempts at sickening shock value — a broken bone or, most egregiously, a subplot in which Connor and Eddie take a drunken popular senior girl (Loren Gray) to Taco Bell and endure an intestinal disaster so disgusting I nearly turned the movie off.

The film’s overreliance on poop jokes for half the movie admittedly burned through a lot of my goodwill, but not all of it. When the kids aren’t having an all-out brawl, trying to arrange drug deals, or weathering a literal shitstorm, small moments of chemistry, particularly between an attractive Thames and believably cool Ferreira, keep the movie from feeling like an R-rated writing exercise. The Chernins are smart enough not to wrap things up in a neat “just be yourself” mood at the end, but Incoming could have worn its heart a little more.