If senior prom is supposed to be one of the pinnacles of one’s high school career, why is Joe Nussbaum’s Prom so half-baked, predictable, and unmemorable? Despite an ungainly large cast of characters, there’s nothing new here, and the one or two moderately interesting ideas the film has to offer can’t surmount the incredibly flat direction and some of the uninspiring performances on display. It might have worked fine for a simple after school special, but on the evidence of the finished product, the makings for a feature film were distinctly slack by even the least demanding standards possible.
Prom (Blu-ray Combo Pack)
Directed by Joe Nussbaum
Studio: Disney
Year: 2011
Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1 1080p AVC codec
Running Time: 104 minutes
Rating: PG
Audio: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 English; Dolby Digital 5.1 Spanish, French
Subtitles: SDH, French, Spanish
Region: A-B-C
MSRP: $ 39.99
Release Date: August 30, 2011
Review Date: August 24, 2011
The Film
2.5/5
With senior prom only three weeks away, all of the hard work by the prom committee goes up in smoke when the decorations being stored there get burned up in a shed fire. Most affected is senior class president Nova Prescott (Aimee Teegarden) who always wants everything to be perfect and has strived for her whole life to arrange things so they would be. When the rest of the committee bails out of redoing the decorations, the school principal (Jere Burns) assigns chronic bad boy Jesse Richter (Thomas McDonell) to assist as punishment for his latest malfeasance. Disliking the whole notion of prom, Jesse isn’t much help at first, but once he sees how much it means to Nova, he begins to pitch in. Elsewhere, school jock Tyler Barso (De'Vaughn Nixon) is cheating on longtime girl friend Jordan (Kylie Bunbury) with sophomore Simone Daniels (Danielle Campbell), a girl who’s also caught the eye of Lucas Arnaz (Nolan Sotillo), one half of the school’s bromantic music nerd duo with fellow geek Corey Doyle (Cameron Monaghan). Invisible senior Lloyd Taylor (Nicholas Braun) finds himself dateless for prom and spends his last three weeks trying everything he can think of to find a girl for his date.
Katie Wech’s screenplay is free of invention with the exception of the film’s one inspired running gag: Lloyd’s numerous attempts to land himself a date using every method he can think of to ask girls out, all utter failures but several of them actually funny disasters. Elsewhere, though, there’s nothing new on display as our main couple Nova and Jesse meet cute on a bench outside the principal’s office where even the newest of filmgoers will be able to predict what will happen to the couple within ninety minutes of screen time of their meeting. The story of the jock cheating on his girl is filled with hoary clichés even for a Disney movie, and his eventual comeuppance doesn’t land with anything like a satisfactory thrill. Other stories (a girl afraid to tell her boy friend of her acceptance to a college clear across the country, the school stoner discussing his hot Greek girl friend who no one believes exists, the clueless heartthrob who lets Nova down early and often) are even less interesting, and director Joe Nussbaum’s pacing is dreadful stretching out these uninspired and uninvolving storylines well past the point of endurance. Easily several of them could have been cut thus trimming the film’s running time to something closer to eighty minutes, a more reasonable length for a film this innocuous.
Individually Aimee Teegarden and Thomas McDonell play their parts well enough (she has some sparkle; he has the bad boy swagger down), but the chemistry between them is lacking. Actually, Cameron Monaghan’s notable disappointment when his friend ditches him continually for the girl is the film’s most telling performance. Nicholas Braun as the desperate Lloyd is also believably real as that student no one remembers being in his class at the time or years after the fact. Danielle Campbell has significant twinkle as the girl two boys are both crazy about. Dean Norris as Nova’s concerned father who wants more for his daughter than a motorcycle-riding grease monkey has the only notable adult role which he handles with authority despite its less than inspired creation.
Video Quality
3/5
The film has been framed at 1.78:1 and is presented in 1080p using the AVC codec. This is one of the most disappointing high definition encodes for a new film seen in quite some time. Sharpness is usually only average with many details soft and mushy. There is a contrast haze that hovers over certain scenes and shots which also dissipates color fidelity and saturation levels making them erratic and unsatisfying. Flesh tones are reasonably natural, but black levels are rather poor. The film has been divided into 12 chapters.
Audio Quality
4/5
The DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 sound mix does its job well with dialogue always discernible and placed in the center channel. The music score by Deborah Lurie and a rich selection of modern pop music gets threaded generously through the soundstage giving it its major surround activity. There are a few ambient sounds placed in the fronts and rears and an occasional panning effect from back to front (Jesse’s motorcycle coming and going) that give the track some texture.
Special Features
3/5
All of the featurettes are presented in 1080p.
“Last Chance Lloyd” combines scenes from the film showing Lloyd’s desperate attempts to land a date with footage cut from the feature and added to this featurette. It runs 10 ¼ minutes.
“Putting on Prom” is a 6-minute featurette with director Joe Nussbaum, writer Katie Wech, and several members of the cast commenting on their ideas about the movie and their own senior proms.
The blooper reel runs for 2 ½ minutes.
There are four deleted scenes with optional introductions to each by director Joe Nussbaum and producer Justin Springer explaining the necessity for their deletion. They may be viewed individually or in one 7 ¾-minute grouping.
There are seven music videos featuring songs used as background in the movie. They may be viewed together in a 24 ¼-minute block or watched individually. The songs included are “Not Your Birthday,” “Your Surrender,” “Time Stand,” “We Could Be Anything” (both English and Spanish versions), “I’ll Be Yours,” and “Come On, Let’s Go.”
The disc contains promo trailers for Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, The Muppets, Cars 2, African Cats, and Shake It Up.
The second disc in the set is the DVD copy of the movie.
In Conclusion
2.5/5 (not an average)
No great shakes as a comedy or teenage angst movie¸ Prom is fluffy but forgettable entertainment. Tweens may enjoy its predictable mélange of stories, but for anyone nearing prom age or older, it’s going to seem awfully familiar and not very interesting.
Matt Hough
Charlotte, NC
