Take Me Home Tonight Review

The critical thrashing Take Me Home Tonight has received at the collective hands of the critics suggests that those we entrust to assess the quality of films have trouble applying their talents to the comedy genre.  So often, hilarious movies are outright dismissed because they're silly fun and don't aspire or pretend to be anything more.  While sheer entertainment will likely never be as satisfying or seem as important as something with deeper artistic meaning, comedies specifically can benefit from throwing higher endeavors to the wind and reveling in rampant goofiness and cheap laughs.  This isn't true of every entry in the genre - Adam Sandler joints tend to be too satisfied with the lowest forms of comedy and suffer because of it - but when reviewing a movie that seeks only to make its audience laugh, it's fair, to some degree, to allow the soreness of your stomach be as much of an influence in judging the film as the satisfaction of your mind.

All this to say: Take Me Home Tonight is a pretty funny movie.  It finds much of its comedy in its setting, a pretty common trope for movies taking place in our recent past.  This vague celebration of how things were certainly brings about some laughs, or at least pangs of nostalgia, but the film has much more going for it than its broad stroll down memory lane.

The characters populating the world of Take Me Home Tonight stray from the usual easy caricatures you often see in this sort of movie.  The characters are more well-rounded, more obviously motivated, more complicated and thus relatable and thus endearing.  It's a refreshing young cast of somewhat familiar faces who don't stoop to lower comedic levels for the sake of sympathy laughs.  Instead, they focus their energies into creating characters we care about as we watch them go through some unfortunate, but rarely ridiculous, situations.

Topher Grace of That 70's Show fame leads the cast, playing his typical nice guy persona to great effect.  It's easy to see why he falls so hard for Teresa Palmer, who looks the part of an idealized '80s beauty queen and crafts a character who is neither the shallow popular girl nor the too-perfect prom queen.  It's refreshing to have a romantic interest who is quite obviously not the most accepting or deserving partner, but becomes a better person through the relationship and thus manages to live up to, and even exceed, the protagonist's lofty expectations.

The Comedy MVP Award goes to Dan Fogler, whose character goes all-out for a crazy night after being fired from his job at the car dealership.  Fogler's misadventures stray into some wild (and wildly awkward) territory, making a nice complement to the more grounded hijinks that come with lying to a girl to make her interested in you.

While the story can't be called anything but tired, Take Me Home Tonight injects enough character and genuine humor into its familiar proceedings to make it a blast to the past worth checking out.  Inexplicably shelved for years before its release, it's one of the best comedies to come out so far this year, and will likely outpace (in terms of quality, not box office) some of the bigger-budgeted offerings that succeed because of their star pedigree rather than their quality.