Is This Netflix Movie the Next ‘Superbad’?

It’s understandable, even thematically fitting, that the new Netflix teen comedy Incoming looks up to Superbad like a younger brother idolizing his cool older siblings. Superbad may not itself be about the cool kids, but in terms of one-wild-night teen comedies, it’s just about the funniest and best-made version we’ve seen so far this century—something for any comic filmmaker to admire. So when Incoming rips it off, it’s hard to sustain much ill will. In fact, quite the opposite: The movie’s aspirations earn it a line of credit that it may not actually deserve.

Reversing the vantage of Superbad’s about-to-graduate seniors, Incoming centers on four insecure friends who have just begun their freshman year of high school. Otherwise, the characters line up pretty easily: Benj (Mason Thames) is the sweetly nerdy Michael Cera type nursing a longtime crush on Bailey (Isabella Ferreira), his year-older sister’s bestie; Danah (Bardia Seiri) is the Jonah Hill wannabe wild man, whose older brother is throwing a school-kickoff rager, where both he and Benj hope to get lucky and cement their high-school coolness; and Eddie (Ramon Reed) and Connor (Raphael Alejandro) share the McLovin-style side adventure, as two nerdier guys who don’t make it to the party and wind up driving around all night instead. (Connor even gets an immediate nickname, albeit a less triumphant one, not of his choosing.)

These aren’t the only story threads running through Incoming, which writer-directors Dave and John Chernin sometimes let wander into a Can’t Hardly Wait-style ensemble. Bobby Cannavale is on hand as a cool but lonely science teacher who winds up partying with his students, essentially doing a longer-form version of the Saturday Night Live “Party Song” video from a few years back. Eddie and Connor wind up chauffeuring around a drunken Katrina (Loren Gray), the school’s most popular online influencer; Benj’s sister Alyssa (Ali Gallo) starts to come to terms with her own insecurities; lots of people learn, or half-learn, to be themselves, rather than trying to be cool.

Are these running gags or full-fledged subplots? It’s hard to say. Some of them are kind of funny, and hardly any of them outright bomb—but nothing really kills, either. The Chernins, veterans of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, are clearly trying to work in the anything-goes mode of outrageous R-rated comedy, full of profane one-liners and the lovably reckless behavior of youth—only here, much of the worst behavior is haphazardly staged, conveniently elided, or anonymized into montages of characters we don’t actually know. It’s fine that Incoming is missing the bullying or gross-out gags that make so many “classic” teen comedies far less rewatchable than Superbad. Unfortunately, it’s also missing crucial comic timing, which consistently throws the movie off, even when its runtime barely passes 80 minutes before the credits roll.

The clunkiness starts with the dialogue, which often sounds canned rather than improvised. (Though Superbad was more tightly scripted than it appeared, much of it sounded thrillingly like it was rattled off straight from its leads’ brains.)

Fair enough that none of these actors are as seasoned as a young Cera or Hill; the bigger problem is that they’re unsupported by the Chernins’ direction. Comic reversals, like a conflict that ping-pongs between an impending fight and chumminess, are mistimed, stepping on punchlines. Payoffs vary from predictable to nonexistent to weirdly punishing; the movie’s attempts at larger-scale slapstick aren’t calibrated for sight-gag hilarity, and characters suffer injuries that feel weirdly real even as they exist in a cartoonish realm. The movie often feels as if it’s second-guessing itself, unsure if it wants to exact pitiless humiliations upon its characters, or reward them for being essentially nice people.

In all the commotion, the movie shortchanges its most appealing element: Benj’s dawning suspicion that Bailey might actually like him back, further complicated (though not really enough) by his sister’s mean-girl hostility. Thames and Ferreira aren’t especially hilarious in their roles, but they do convey the nervous excitement of young love, and their final moment together has unexpected rom-com zing. That final flicker of a sweet-tart ending also functions as a moment of clarity, revealing just how uninterested Incoming has been in taking its own advice about chilling out and being yourself. Whatever this movie’s authentic identity could have been, it doesn’t seem like an outrageous party flick is the right fit.