Labor Day 1988, and what does Matt Franklin have to show for his degree from MIT? A job back in his hometown at Suncoast Video, lining up the VHS boxes while he figures out what he wants to do with his life.
That could explain why, when his high-school crush walks into the store, he pretends
to have a job in high finance, and promises to meet her later at an end-of-summer party for their old classmates.
The consequences of this fib are tracked in “Take Me Home Tonight,” a film squarely in that time-honored tradition of the party film. The action takes place over the course of a single day and night, during which time lessons are learned and bridges are crossed.
Matt is played by Topher Grace, the onetime “That ’70s Show” star, who also produced the film and co-wrote the original story. Grace has good comic timing, and he’s almost too convincing in portraying an aimless, near-depressed postgrad.
Matt’s twin sister, Wendy (reliable but underused Anna Faris), is also headed for the party, which is hosted by her clueless boyfriend (Chris Pratt, from “Parks and Recreation”).
Footnote to backstage romance: Faris grew up in Edmonds, Pratt graduated from Lake Stevens High School, but they met while shooting this film and married in 2009.
The obnoxious, heavyset, bad-boy role of Matt’s best buddy is taken by Dan Fogler, who has performed similar duties in “Fanboys” and “Balls of Fury.” Teresa Palmer, who showed up a couple of weeks ago in “I Am Number Four,” plays the high-school crush, and gives the part much more interest than it usually gets in movies like this.
Toss in a couple of funny supporting bits by Demetri Martin and Michael Ian Black, and the film undeniably has its share of genuine laughs, even if they tend to be spaced a little too broadly during the picture.
Throughout “Take Me Home Tonight,” you can feel everybody trying to get it right, trying to hit the proper notes of comedy and danger and maybe just a wee bit of melancholy. And not quite hitting it.
The songs are all there, the occasional gems and the cringe-inducing horrors. And the costumes and the hairstyles are in place, although by 1988 some of the decade’s more extravagant violations of taste had ebbed a bit.
When it comes right down to it, the material is too generic to really click. The R rating allows for some energetic cocaine-snorting and an offbeat sex scene, but none of it passes the freshness test. I wasn’t that crazy about “Hot Tub Time Machine” — another comic view of the ’80s — either, but at least it had a new wrinkle. What “Take Me Home Tonight” lacks is a hot tub that is actually a time machine, or its equivalent.
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