For those of you who thought Topher Grace couldn’t do anything but seventies roles and bungle Marvel characters (seriously, Eddie Brock? This guy’s about as believable as Eddie Brock as Lindsay Lohan is as Jabba the Hutt.), well, you’ll be getting a note of validation as he does passably well with another retro decade: the eighties. The folks out at Fox sent out a copy of Take Me Home Tonight for us to review for you, and the end result is astoundingly watchable.
Take Me Home Tonight follows Matt Franklin, mall Suncoast Motion Picture Company worker, who believes his life to be going rapidly nowhere. But when his old high school crush Tori walks back into his life–and his job–he finds he’s got one opportunity to win her heart for the first time. But in order to pull this minor miracle off, he’s going to have to survive a night of drunken, brain-damaging debauchery in the grandest eighties style.
And just in case you’re worried about a lack of eighties references here, don’t be. This thing is positively dripping with eighties references. It’s so eighties it eats glasnost, sleeps perestroika, and breathes Alf. It’s so eighties that it’s always Morning in America…even in the afternoon.
The thing about Take Me Home Tonight is that it’s a pretty amazing commentary on life after high school. I remember thinking about a lot of this kind of thing when I got out of high school. In fact, it’s the kind of thing that’s not too hard to think about even well out of high school–the grand duel of what you want against what you need, the struggle to figure out just what to do with your life, comparing yourself to those around you and wondering if you come up short against them–and will resonate with a whole lot of people.
It resonates, and thus, it’s going to find plenty of people who enjoy it. Really, if you’ve ever looked at your life and wondered if that was all there was, or how you would stack up to the people you laughed at in high school today, well, this is your movie.
Of course, if you’re pretty satisfied with your life, or you’re not into the eighties, then you’re not going to find much to like here. But since that particular segment of the population is pretty small, you’ll probably do just fine here.
The Screenhead Ten Scale gives Take Me Home Tonight a nine out of ten for being a worthwhile performance that a lot of people will find common ground with. When you see something that might well describe your life, or that of one of your friends, it makes you that little bit more interested in watching. And Take Me Home Tonight will do just that.
