Zac Efron
(2 of 2)
The obvious answer — wear a condom — does not lend itself to a redemption movie. So a magical janitor, a kind of hobo Gandalf, appears, and — poof! — Mike is 17 again at his old school, only it's today; he's got the body of a teen god and the crafty mind of a 37-year-old loser. Among his classmates are his two kids, whom he quickly befriends so he can snoop on his wife. Oddly, she and Maggie are both attracted to the newcomer. Cue the comedy complications. What if Maggie wanted to have sex with this dreamy teen — her father? And what if Scarlet got an erotic yen for this 17-year-old — her husband? Scarlet's relation to Mike, once restless wife to depressive husband, is suddenly cougar to boychick.
Filching from the '80s body-switch parables Peggy Sue Got Married and Big in ways that are by turns perplexing, annoying and endearing, 17 Again has lessons in tow: that kids will take fatherly advice only from another teen, that a life full of compromises and defeats is still worth cherishing and that Efron can nail a tearful public declaration of hopeless love with the assurance of a young Tom Hanks. He said he wanted to act, and now he has — pretty well.
An Old-Fashioned Star
No question that Efron is a movie star, but of what era? Adept at comedy and solemnity, synthesizing Michael J. Fox and David Cassidy in their early adorable phases, he is, so far, a movie anachronism — a throwback to when there was a big market for nice. Utterly at ease in the camera's gaze, he's not a preener; he gives the impression of being an O.K. guy who in his spare time is also this teen heartthrob. Which may be a higher form of acting: star acting.
Efron's brand of star acting is a purring geniality that in an older man would make you want to vote for him. Movie stardom is a form of politics in which people vote by buying tickets. But the electorate is fickle. The Efron effect could be evanescent.
It's a truism that a TV star provides comfort — a presence viewers want to invite into their homes each week — while a movie star offers danger, some internal melodrama, a bit of menace promising thrills in the dark. For now, Efron is bridging those worlds, importing his High School Musical tweens to movie houses, where their money is good too. The streak looks to hold with the cannily bigenerational 17 Again. Things will change, because he'll grow older and his current fans will grow up. But no one seems more prepared for that evolution, for his grownup closeup, than Zac Efron.
See pictures of eighth-graders being recruited for college basketball.